IA that 'works' before lawyers becomes the target of OAB/SP proceedings

The Brazilian Bar Association – São Paulo Section (OAB/SP) filed a lawsuit against Talisman AI, the company behind the startup Enter, over the limits of AI use in law. The entity claims that the platform offers resources that encroach on activities considered exclusive to lawyers.

The public civil action was distributed on Wednesday (7). As of now, there is no decision on the urgent requests filed by OAB-SP.

The entity wants the company to suspend certain platform features and advertisements that, according to the lawsuit, present the technology as capable of replacing lawyers' work or providing ready-made defenses.

Enter, on the other hand, claims that it has been having conversations with the Federal Council of the OAB for months regarding AI use in the sector and that it was not contacted by the São Paulo section before the lawsuit. The company stated that it intends to present clarifications to correct what it considers to be inaccurate information used as the basis for the case.

What the company's AI does

• Founded in 2023, Enter develops AI agents for the legal sector. According to the company, the technology is used by legal departments of large companies to monitor civil and labor processes, analyze data, identify fraud and irregularities, and perform legal analytics;
The platform also automates steps in the processes, such as action registration, case law analysis, and drafting of legal notes;
• According to the OAB-SP, more than 300,000 judicial cases pass through the EnterOS system annually, used by more than 40 large companies, including banks, airlines, retailers, and digital platforms;
• The main concern of the entity is related to the degree of autonomy of the AI agents. According to the action, the systems read documents from the cases, extract information that can be used in defense, cross-reference external data, identify patterns of irregularities, and produce texts that can be used by the legal department or the law firm to define a strategy.

OAB-SP also cites a statement from Enter's CEO, Mateus Costa-Ribeiro, according to which every imaginable step of a judicial process is initially handled by an AI agent before human involvement. For the entity, this model could represent a functional replacement of the lawyer.

Enter disputes this interpretation. The company states that the legal handling of the cases remains under the responsibility of qualified lawyers hired by the companies that use the platform. According to the startup, these professionals continue to be responsible for reviewing, signing, and filing the documents, and law firms remain indispensable.

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What the OAB-SP wantsThe entity requests that the Enter suspend ads that present its products as substitutes for lawyers or as tools capable of providing ready defenses. For this determination, the OAB-SP requests a daily fine of R$ 10,000 in case of non-compliance.The Order also wants to prevent new contracts or the expansion of current ones when there is a recommendation of strategies or drafting of briefs for specific cases without the identification of the responsible lawyer and the registration of the review. In this case, the entity requests a fine of R$ 50,000 per contract.Other requests include access to the platform's records and the conduct of an independent audit to verify how the briefs are produced and reviewed. The analysis would include information such as the model parametrization and the records of text generation, review, and export.Process data also enters the disputeThe lawsuit also questions the treatment of information present in judicial processes. According to OAB-SP, the platform works with contracts, audio, video, and extracts and uses external databases to identify possible frauds and cases of "coordinated action between litigants."

The entity's concern is that classifying people as possible coordinated litigants could result in profiling consumers and workers who resort to the judiciary.

The process also raises questions about the processing of sensitive data, including health information, and about the processing of this information by foreign language model providers. OAB-SP requests that the judiciary refer to the National Data Protection Authority (ANPD) to investigate the handling of data.

Enter claims to have SOC 2 certification for information processing and states it follows the General Data Protection Law (LGPD). The company also states that customer data is not used to train AI models and maintains "Zero Data Retention" agreements with OpenAI and Anthropic.

According to the company, each customer's data is kept separately.

OAB-SP says it is not against AI

Despite the action, OAB-SP states that it is not opposed to the use of AI in law. In the process, the entity says it supports technological innovation and maintains partnerships related to digitization, AI, and process management.

The Order's argument is that technology should function as a work tool under the supervision of a lawyer, and not as an independent provider of activities considered exclusive to the profession.

Enter presents a different view on the purpose of its agents. For the company, automation serves to return time to lawyers for tasks that require professional judgment, such as defining theses, strategies, and decisions.

The company maintains that the legal handling of cases and professional responsibility continue to be in the hands of lawyers hired by its clients.