AI Security, Agentic Risk & What lawyers need to understand with Rok Popov Ledinski

We sit down with Rok Popov Ledinski — an independent legal AI and data consultant whose background spans high-security enterprise engineering through to advising law firms on their AI and security strategy. Our initial interest in Rok's work was sparked by his YouTube channel, where he's been producing sharp, accessible breakdowns of the real risks underpinning today's AI tools.

Within minutes, we're into a forensic dissection of Anthropic's Claude Cowork — the agentic tool pitched at non-developers that launched earlier this year. Rok walks us through the contradictions in Anthropic's own technical documentation: a tool demonstrated by its creators as a way to organise your desktop, while the same support pages advise against granting it access to sensitive local files. A tool marketed for running tasks autonomously in the background — while its activity isn't captured by audit logs. A tool whose safety guidance asks users to watch for "suspicious actions that may indicate prompt injections" — aimed at an audience that, as Rok points out, has largely never heard of prompt injections. 

Rok explains, in terms accessible to non-technical listeners, how hidden instructions embedded in an innocuous document can hijack an AI agent into exfiltrating sensitive client data. His hypothetical attack vector for law firms is disarmingly simple: find lawyers on LinkedIn who are openly using Cowork, send a document to their publicly available email address containing concealed instructions, and let the agent do the rest.

But this isn't an anti-AI conversation. Rok is emphatic that these tools should be used — just not naively. Drawing on enterprise security frameworks from companies like Cisco, he advocates for a practical middle ground: map what your AI has access to, create sanitised copies of sensitive folders, scope permissions tightly, vet your MCP servers and plugins, and understand (physically, not just contractually) how data flows through your systems.

Key Takeaways

The Cowork Paradox: Anthropic's own documentation reveals a tension between how Cowork is marketed (autonomous, background task execution) and how it should be used (limited permissions, no sensitive files, manual monitoring for prompt injections). 

Security attacks are now a "When," Not an "If": Unlike traditional cybersecurity breaches, prompt injection attacks exploit a fundamental limitation of large language models — they can't distinguish instructions from data. Research shows success rates as high as 90% for some proprietary LLMs. Claude is among the more resistant, but not immune.

Practical Security for Legal Teams: Rok's actionable advice for in-house teams and law firms includes: creating clean data environments separate from originals; using self-hostable workflow tools like n8n; scoping AI permissions to the minimum necessary; and conducting genuine due diligence on every plugin and MCP server before connecting it to your systems.

Key References

• Rok's YouTube Channel: where our interest in Rok's work began, and a recommended follow for anyone wanting to stay across the security dimensions of legal AI adoption
• Rok's LinkedIn — he hosts weekly live sessions every Saturday with a security expert specialising in air-gapped, offline AI deployments in regulated industries
• The Art of Modern Legal Warfare — Rok co authors with a former guest and friend of the show Anna Guo and Sakshi Udeshi a series of vulnerability types specific to legal AI use cases.

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