Lawyers

When you paste a client name, case summary, or document excerpt into ChatGPT or Claude, that text leaves your office. It's transmitted to Microsoft's or Anthropic's servers, processed by their infrastructure, and potentially retained in ways that are difficult to audit or control.

Local AI is different in a fundamental way: the model runs on hardware in your office. Your text is processed locally. Nothing is transmitted to a third-party AI provider. The data handling model is categorically different from cloud AI.

Whether local AI satisfies your specific bar obligations or privilege requirements is a matter for your professional judgment and your state bar's guidance — we configure tools for privacy, not for compliance certification. But the underlying data handling fact is clear: with local AI, your client data doesn't leave your building.

We set up AnythingLLM for document-heavy work, which lets you upload case files and ask questions about them without uploading those files to any cloud service.