Clallam County has shared internal communications involving artificial intelligence tools used by staff in the Superior Court Clerk’s Office. The records, obtained through a public-records request, detail how employees leveraged Microsoft Copilot for tasks such as drafting promotion justifications, condensing correspondence, and troubleshooting missing email signatures.
The disclosure covers activity from three clerk’s office employees: the court clerk herself, Nikki Botnen, along with Lisa MacDonald and Tamara Clarkson. Files were compiled from their respective Copilot accounts and include both prompts entered by users and the AI’s generated outputs.
The largest volume of material centers on personnel documentation. On May 7, Botnen requested a customizable letter template for human resources concerning promotion recommendations. Copilot delivered a structured draft, broken into sections covering job performance, leadership capacity, organizational impact, and readiness for advancement. Botnen then asked for adjustments, including expanding the section on the employee’s value to the agency and simplifying a sentence about the promotion’s departmental benefits. One revised phrasing read: “This promotion recognizes her contributions and allows her to use her strengths in a way that will improve our department’s overall efficiency.”
Later that same day, Botnen asked for a rewritten promotion recommendation highlighting how quickly the employee had distinguished herself. Copilot proposed multiple versions, prompting additional refinements—such as clarifying expectations during the employee’s inaugural year and updating a section heading.
MacDonald’s entries include a Sept. 28 prompt requesting a summary of an email regarding court scheduling. Copilot responded with a concise overview of the Oct. 6 docket and a motion-calendar confirmation attachment, offering to further distill the attachment or highlight specific cases and hearing categories.
Clarkson’s usage of the tool began earlier, with an initial July 2025 inquiry about how AI could support daily workflows. After asking what kinds of tasks the tool could assist with, she received suggestions including drafting and editing emails, condensing messages, and managing calendar items.
On June 25, 2026, Clarkson sought help locating missing email signatures, prompting Copilot to provide links to templates and documentation, plus step-by-step guidance for restoring Outlook signatures.
A brief exchange on July 21, 2026, addressed an upcoming court recess. Clarkson asked for assistance in preparing official notices, and Copilot proposed options for announcements and minute entries.
The county’s response to the public records request—submitted Sept. 28 and delivered Oct. 16—included archives from the three clerk’s office accounts. The final delivery comprises 21 HTML files documenting six distinct conversation threads, some of which contain duplicated outputs from the AI.
The request covered AI activity from Jan. 1, 2023, onward, encompassing multiple platforms including ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and other large language models.
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