Private AI for law firms
Courts have held that putting client material into public AI tools can waive privilege. Not might feel risky — can waive it, because the material was handed to a third party under that company’s terms. Every lawyer in your building already knows this, which is why the honest choices today are “no AI” or “AI the client files never touch.” This is the second one: a machine that lives in your office, reads what the firm gives it, and answers from it — and the files physically cannot leave the building, because the reading and the drafting happen inside it.
Not a policy that promises nobody looks. An architecture in which there is nothing to look at — no copy of your matters on anyone else’s computers, including ours.
What changed
For two years the profession has been caught between two facts: the tools are genuinely useful, and the confidential material is exactly what makes them useful. Public AI tools resolve that tension badly — the client file goes to the tool. This machine resolves it the other way — the tool comes to the client file. Your matters stay where they have always belonged: inside the firm, under the firm’s control, subject to nobody else’s terms of service. Whether any particular use of an outside tool affects privilege in your jurisdiction is a question for your ethics counsel, not for us. Our part is simpler: on this machine, the question never has to come up.
What the firm hands it
Section 9, page 14 — and it differs from the version you sent in June.
Every matter, one question away.
Pleadings, exhibits, and correspondence in order. Two exhibits are missing signatures.
The binder, assembled overnight.
Four filings. The Halvorsen response is first, on Tuesday the 11th.
Deadlines watched, not remembered.
Five pages, with the three answers that changed. Page numbers on every point.
Read what matters first.
Twice — a 2019 lease dispute and a matter you declined in 2022. Both files are flagged for your review.
Twenty years of matters, remembered.
From your own template, with the scope you described. It waits for a partner’s yes before anything goes out.
Drafted in the firm’s voice.
A day at the firm
Five moments from a normal Tuesday.
- A brief with your coffee: today’s matters, what’s due, whose file needs your eyes.
- Thursday’s binder was assembled overnight. Two missing signatures are flagged.
- It drafted the request to the clerk to move the hearing, and told everyone on the matter.
- A 60-page deposition comes back as five pages you can use in the meeting — with the page numbers.
- Unbilled hours surface. Tomorrow’s filings are queued for your review.
And none of it left the building. That is the whole point — the sentence you can say to a client with a straight face.
The math, per firm instead of per lawyer
The cloud tools bill per seat. A serious user runs past $100 a month in AI subscriptions before any specialist legal tool — and the specialist tools bill per lawyer too, every month, forever. Eight people at that rate is roughly $10,000 a year just for the general apps, with every question travelling to someone else’s computers, and at the end of five years the firm owns nothing.
This is one flat membership for the whole firm. Studio carries partners and staff together — no per-seat fees, ever. A small firm of up to four people fits Home. And the arrangement ends somewhere: stay a year, and the machine — and everything it has learned about your matters — is yours to keep. Cancel after that and it keeps working, in your office, without us.
Privilege, in plain words
The everyday shape of the service is the answer: the reading, drafting, and answering happen on the machine in your office, and the channel we use to care for the system carries device health — never your documents, mail, or matters. When we load the firm’s archive, the work is done under a written scope, and our working copies are erased afterward with a written deletion confirmation, every time. Anything beyond that is scoped in writing before it happens. We will not give you legal advice about privilege; we will give you an architecture that does not create the disclosure in the first place.
The way in: the Founding Sixteen
We are opening this as a numbered founding cohort — sixteen memberships: twelve Home, four Studio. Home is $8,995 for the founding year (list $10,995 after the cohort), renewing at $4,995 a year; Studio is $19,995 for the founding year (list $24,995), renewing at $11,995 a year — founding rates locked for as long as membership is continuous. Annual only, everything included: the machine, onboarding done before it ships, the firm’s archive loaded, integrations set up, updates, backups, monitoring, and human support. Nothing else to buy.
It is application-gated: you apply in writing, the application is reviewed, and if we can serve your firm exceptionally, an invitation follows with a ten-day window. A deposit — $500 for Home, $1,000 for Studio — reserves your number, refundable in full until you are accepted and credited to your founding year when you are. The number is engraved on the machine.
Your clients’ business stays the firm’s business. Nothing goes to an outside service until someone at the firm approves it — once, for a while, or always. You hold the valve. No training on your data, no ads, no selling information — ever. Every promise, in plain words, is on the Trust page.
Can using public AI tools really affect privilege?
Courts have held that putting client material into public AI tools can waive privilege, because the material is disclosed to a third party under that provider’s terms. Whether a particular use does so in your jurisdiction is a question for your ethics counsel, not for us. What we change is the architecture: here the reading and drafting happen on a machine inside your office, so the client file is never handed to anyone.
Does the firm’s material ever reach you?
No. The channel we use to care for the machine carries device health only — which machine it is, whether it is healthy, whether the last backup verified — never documents or conversations. Archive loading is done under a written scope, and our working copies are erased afterward with a written deletion confirmation.
Weighing it against the apps? Your own assistant vs the AI apps — including the honest part about what the big outside models still do better, and how the valve handles it.
Not sure it fits your firm? Write to us first — if it is not right for you, we will say so before any invitation.
Apply for a founding place How the firm’s files get loadedConfidentiality as architecture, not a promise
The firm’s reading, drafting, and archive on a machine inside the firm — flat for the whole office, and yours to keep after a year.
Apply for a founding placeSixteen founding places — twelve Home, four Studio · deposit refundable until acceptance · ownership vests at twelve months