Maintaining Privilege In AI-assisted Internal Investigations

Key Take-aways

1. Swiss law has no AI-specific privilege rules. Whether AI-generated investigation outputs are protected turns on counsel directed legal analysis – a question Swiss courts have yet to resolve.

2. Several regimes may apply cumulatively; privilege, data protection, and the blocking statute – each constraining how and where AI tools may be used.

3. Privilege over AI outputs is won or lost before deployment. Poor governance produces unprotected, potentially discoverable investigation material at the worst possible moment.

1 Background

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are increasingly being employed in corporate internal investigations. The primary drivers are practical: AI dramatically reduces first pass document review times, identifies patterns in large datasets that human reviewers might miss, extracts key data points for tabular comparison, and rapidly produces structured interview records. In complex, multijurisdictional investigations spanning millions of