Legal
Your team is already using AI. The question is where the documents go.
Every firm we speak to says the same thing: they have not approved any AI tool, and they are quite sure someone is using one anyway. Draft advices, discovery bundles, client correspondence — pasted into a free chatbot to summarise, because it saves an hour. The output is genuinely useful. That is exactly why it keeps happening.
Request an assessmentYour obligation
Confidentiality and privilege are not policies you can update
A solicitor’s duty of confidentiality is a professional obligation, not an internal guideline. Legal professional privilege attaches to communications, and disclosing privileged material to a third party can risk waiving it — a risk that does not care whether the disclosure was deliberate or an associate trying to save time on a Thursday night. A public AI service is a third party. Its servers are typically overseas. Once the material has been transmitted, you cannot un-transmit it, and you may not be able to tell a client, a court or your insurer exactly where it went.
Where it’s happening
The four places we see it most
None of these are careless people. They are competent staff doing the work faster, using a tool that is genuinely good at it.
Summarising discovery
Large document sets pasted in chunks to find the relevant material fast. This is the single most common use we hear about, and the single largest volume of confidential text leaving the firm.
Drafting and redrafting advice
Client names, matter facts and commercial terms included so the draft is actually usable. Anonymising properly takes longer than writing it, so it does not happen.
Translating or plain-Englishing contracts
Whole executed agreements uploaded to produce a client-friendly summary — including parties, consideration and confidentiality clauses.
Correspondence triage
Inbox contents pasted in to draft replies, carrying counterparty positions and settlement figures with them.
The alternative
Same capability, nothing leaves
A private system does not ask your team to give anything up. It does the same work on the same documents — it simply does it on a machine you own, sitting in your own office.
See how it works →- Summarise long documents and discovery sets without the text leaving your network
- Draft correspondence and file notes against real matter facts
- Search across your own precedent bank in plain English
- Produce plain-English client summaries of executed agreements
- Give every fee earner the productivity gain without the disclosure
Law Firms: common questions
- Is using ChatGPT with client documents a breach of confidentiality?
- That is a question for your firm and your professional indemnity insurer, not for us — and the answer depends on the specific tool, its terms, and what was disclosed. What we can say plainly is that transmitting client material to a third-party service places it outside your control and typically outside Australia. A private on-premise system removes the question entirely, because nothing is transmitted.
- Can we not just use the paid enterprise version?
- Paid tiers generally offer better contractual commitments around training and retention than free tiers, and that is a genuine improvement. It is still a disclosure to a third party, still usually processed offshore, and still dependent on that provider honouring its terms and remaining solvent and unbreached. On-premise is a different category of answer: the data does not move.
- Will it be as good as the public tools?
- For document summarisation, drafting, extraction and Q&A over your own material — the work that actually fills a fee earner’s day — the open models available today are strong and the gap is not what most people assume. For frontier reasoning on novel problems, the large commercial models still lead. We will tell you honestly which of your use cases fall on which side before you spend anything.
No obligation
Is this worth it for a firm like yours?
Tell us roughly how many people, what they handle, and what you suspect is already happening. We will give you a straight answer — including if the answer is that you do not need us.