Every document your firm places in a third-party cloud, every prompt your people type into a public AI interface, and every workflow you run on infrastructure you do not own is copied to a machine you do not control. This page sets out where that material goes, and describes the alternative: AI installed inside your building, owned outright, with nothing leaving your walls.
Written for firms and offices where confidentiality is the product. It assumes you have already declined to put your practice inside a cloud AI account, and that nobody has yet shown you the alternative.
Three channels. Each appears harmless on its own. Together they move most of a firm's confidential material off premises every working day, under terms the firm did not draft and cannot see.
The file sits on servers the platform operates, in a jurisdiction the platform selects, under terms the platform can amend. The access logs, the sharing links and the administrative keys are theirs. Your firm holds a login.
Retention, sub-processors and disclosure to legal process are decided by the provider. The firm is not a party to those decisions and is rarely told when they change.
A prompt is a disclosure. The matter facts, the client's name, the draft clause, the settlement position: all of it is transmitted to the provider's servers to be processed. Whether it is retained, reviewed by staff, or used to train future models depends on the product tier and a policy the provider can change without your signature.
Most professional staff use the consumer tier on a personal account. The firm has no record of what was pasted, and no way to retrieve it.
Your matter database, your billing, your correspondence and your client portal are each administered by a vendor whose staff hold standing access. Every one of those vendors is a second perimeter you did not design and cannot audit, staffed by people you have never met.
A breach at any one of them is a breach of your file. The notification, when it comes, arrives on their timetable.
The mechanism is not malice. It is architecture. Data follows the path of least resistance, and the path currently leads out of the building.
A schematic plan of a working practice. The interior functions do not change. What changes is where the computation happens, and therefore where the data has to go.
Five interior functions. Five outbound paths crossing the perimeter. One login each, none of them yours.
PLAN IS SCHEMATIC. THE SITE ASSESSMENT PRODUCES THE ACTUAL ONE.
The rules of professional conduct in the jurisdictions we work in require reasonable safeguards for client information. None of them define reasonable as whatever the vendor's terms happen to permit this quarter.
A partner who cannot say where a client file physically resides, who can read it, and under which jurisdiction's process it can be compelled, cannot demonstrate the safeguard.
That is the position most firms occupy today. It is not a failure of diligence. It is the default outcome of buying software the way software is sold. The same holds for a family office: the family's whole picture, consolidated somewhere the family does not control.
This page is not legal advice on your obligations. It is a description of where your data is, so that the advice you do take can be given on accurate facts.
One installation. Three layers. Each is a consequence of hardware you own, running inside your premises, with no subscription and no third party in the path.
Inference hardware delivered, racked and powered at your site. Language models, retrieval across your own document store, and transcription run locally on that hardware. The system operates with the external network disconnected. Where a matter requires it, a segment is air-gapped outright: no physical route to the outside exists.
Client portals, intake, secure document exchange and the working tools your practice actually uses: built for the firm and served from machines the firm owns. Reachable only by verified people on verified devices. No public-cloud dependency in the path between your client and your file.
Research, drafting support, document review, transcription and correspondence triage, performed by systems that run entirely inside your environment and are directed by your people. Each operates under a scoped identity with no route to the outside world except the ones you permit, and a control your firm holds can halt all of them at once. They do the work. They cannot become the breach.
Delivered, racked and powered at your site.
No outbound calls. The system works with the network unplugged.
Nothing is uploaded. Nothing trains anything.
If we disappeared tomorrow, your system keeps running.
Four stages. Each ends with something in writing.
A private conversation with the partner group or principal. Sixty minutes. What you are exposed to, what you are not, and whether this is for you.
A visit. We walk the premises, the power, the network, the records, and the matters that carry the highest exposure. You receive a written scope and a number.
Hardware delivered. Models deployed. Portals and workflows built against your actual practice. Your staff trained on your own system.
Keys, documentation and the running system pass to the firm. Support after handover is contracted separately and can be declined.
There is no subscription. The hardware is a capital asset on your balance sheet, depreciated like any other equipment. Design, installation and handover are a one-time professional fee. Every number is given in writing after the site assessment, not before, because a number given before the visit is a guess.
Every capability described on this page is running somewhere. Where a result has not been measured yet, we say so on the page.
A briefing is not a demonstration and not a proposal. It is sixty minutes with the people who would design and install your system, held at your premises or on a line you control.
If you would rather not use a form, write to [email protected].
A person, not a sequence, will write to you within two business days to arrange the briefing. Nothing you sent has been entered into any third-party system.