Reformulating the Ethics of Attorney-Client Privilege from The Perspective of Personal Data Protection in The Digital Age

Abstract: The development of digital technology has brought fundamental changes to the practice of the legal profession, particularly in the management and protection of client information. This transformation poses serious challenges to the principle of attorney-client privilege, which has long been the foundation of the relationship of trust between attorneys and clients. On the one hand, positive law and professional ethics in Indonesia explicitly require attorneys to maintain client confidentiality. On the other hand, the digitization of legal practice—through the use of electronic storage, online communication, and smart legal technology-expands the risk of data breaches that are not fully accommodated within the current framework of professional ethics. This situation highlights a normative gap between the attorney-client privilege and the dynamics of digital data protection. This study aims to analyze the concept of attorney-client confidentiality from the perspectives of legal professional ethics and personal data protection law, as well as to formulate the need for a reformulation of attorney confidentiality ethics that is adaptive to the digital era. This study employs a normative legal research method using legislative, conceptual, and comparative legal approaches. Legal materials were obtained through a literature review of legislation, professional codes of ethics, scholarly literature, and the practice of regulating lawyer’s professional ethics in several other jurisdictions. The analysis was conducted qualitatively using systematic and prescriptive legal reasoning. The results of the study indicate that the regulation of attorney confidentiality in Indonesia remains oriented toward conventional legal practices and has not explicitly addressed attorney’s digital responsibilities in protecting client data. The absence of clear regulations regarding technological competence and data security has the potential to weaken client confidentiality protections and create normative uncertainty for attorneys. This study emphasizes that attorneys’ confidentiality obligations in the digital age must be understood as multidimensional obligations encompassing ethical, legal, and technological aspects. A reformulation of the legal profession’s ethics must integrate the principles of digital confidentiality, technological competence, and data accountability to align with personal data protection regimes and developments in legal technology. With these updates, the legal profession is expected to maintain its integrity and public trust amidst the digital transformation of legal practice.