Sovereign Legal Intelligence
Sovereign AI for Law Firms That Understand
The Legal Consequences of the Cloud.
CounselCore is a non-cloud, in-house AI system that runs entirely on your infrastructure. It allows attorneys to use modern AI on the firm’s own prior matters without sending a single document to an external provider.
The design assumption is simple: attorney-client privilege, confidentiality obligations, and discovery risk do not disappear in the age of AI. They get more complex. CounselCore is built to respect that reality.
The question every serious firm must answer
How do you give your lawyers the benefit of AI without:
- • exporting privileged material to the cloud,
- • creating new discovery and chain-of-custody risks, or
- • handing your institutional knowledge to a third-party vendor?
Why keep AI in-house instead of in the cloud?
Because legal risk does not end at the documents you draft. It extends to how, where, and by whom those documents are processed. For many matters, pushing work product into cloud AI systems introduces avoidable legal questions.
Attorney-client privilege
When third-party systems handle privileged material, opposing counsel can argue that privilege was weakened or waived. Even if the argument fails, you have created an issue that must be litigated.
In-house AI keeps processing within the firm’s own privilege and ethical boundary.
Discovery and chain of custody
Cloud-based AI can create additional repositories, logs, and backups that are all potentially discoverable. It complicates chain-of-custody narratives and increases the surface area for subpoenas.
With CounselCore, all processing, logs, and artifacts remain inside infrastructure you control and can fully account for.
Confidentiality and ethics
Many ethics rules and client guidelines already restrict where and how sensitive data may be stored or processed. “The cloud” is often acceptable for basic systems—less so for privileged evidence and strategy memos.
In-house AI allows you to demonstrate that no confidential material leaves firm-controlled systems.
Institutional knowledge as evidence and advantage
Your archive of briefs, research, and emails is both potential evidence and competitive advantage. Treating it as training data for a vendor model exposes a core firm asset.
CounselCore lets you search and reason over that history with AI while keeping it fully under your custody.
Let lawyers use AI without creating new issues to argue about.
CounselCore is built for the partner who asks a simple question: “If opposing counsel finds out how we used this system, am I comfortable defending it in court?”
No external processing
All computations occur on firm-controlled hardware. The system does not call out to public APIs or vendor-hosted models for “help.”
Evidence-ready logging
Requests and responses can be logged in a way that supports internal review and, if needed, defensible explanation to courts or regulators.
Use your own record
The system is restricted to your matters, your filings, your research. It does not draw on public training data that may be outdated, biased, or unsuitable for your case.
AI across your entire matter history — without moving a single document to the cloud.
CounselCore uses retrieval-augmented generation on top of your existing document stores. Attorneys can ask questions, draft, and compare across prior matters, while the system stays inside your firewall at all times.
In-house by default
Deployed on firm-controlled servers or private infrastructure. No external LLM endpoints. No silent fallbacks to vendor systems.
Grounded in your documents
Every response is tied back to specific briefs, memos, transcripts, or emails. Lawyers see exactly which internal sources support the answer.
Permissions-aware
Access respects existing matter-level permissions and ethical walls. Attorneys only see what they are already authorized to see.
High-level architecture
- Ingest and index documents from your DMS, file shares, and archives.
- Apply OCR and normalization where needed, with matter-level metadata.
- Store embeddings and metadata in in-house vector and relational stores.
- Serve attorney queries through a secure internal interface with SSO and RBAC.
- Return grounded answers with citations and links to the original documents.
No step in this pipeline requires sending client data, metadata, or prompts to the public internet.
In-house AI versus cloud AI — from a legal risk perspective.
The question is not whether AI is powerful. It is whether the way you use it can be defended to a court, a regulator, a client, or your own partners.
| Issue | Typical Cloud AI | CounselCore (In-House) |
|---|---|---|
| Privilege | Third-party processing may invite privilege challenges. | Processing remains within the firm’s privilege boundary. |
| Discovery scope | Additional logs, backups, and vendor systems to address. | Single, firm-controlled environment to account for. |
| Data residency | Data stored and processed on vendor infrastructure. | Data never leaves your infrastructure. |
| Client assurances | “We rely on vendor security and contracts.” | “We do not send your matters to external AI providers.” |
| Strategic control | Dependent on vendor roadmap and terms of service. | System is operated as internal infrastructure. |
Introduced like any other high-risk, high-value system.
CounselCore is implemented with the same discipline you apply to document management, records retention, and security tooling. No shortcuts, no shadow IT.
Phase 1 – Assessment
Technical and legal risk review with IT, risk, and key partners. Identification of data sources, permissions, and pilot practice areas.
Phase 2 – Pilot
Limited deployment on a defined corpus of prior matters. Measured impact on research, drafting, and knowledge retrieval, with governance review.
Phase 3 – Expansion
Extension to additional practice groups and offices, integrated into standard operating procedures, training, and matter workflows.
Resources for partners and clients.
The following materials are designed to support internal decision-making and external communication about in-house AI over prior matters.
These PDFs are bundled with the theme and will download directly from your CounselCore theme directory.
Two-Page Overview
One-pager for leadership
Explains the business case, legal rationale, and high-level architecture of CounselCore as an in-house AI system over prior matters.
Download overview (PDF)Partner Briefing Memo
Internal decision memo
A structured memo for managing partners and CIOs covering risk posture, governance implications, and recommended next steps for a pilot.
Download briefing (PDF)Partner FAQ
Questions & answers
A concise FAQ addressing common partner questions about privilege, discovery, ethics, client communication, and appropriate use of CounselCore.
Download FAQ (PDF)Request a confidential briefing.
A CounselCore briefing is designed for managing partners, CIOs, risk officers, and practice leaders who want a clear, practical discussion of what in-house AI would mean for their specific firm.
Briefings can be conducted under NDA and structured to avoid discussion of specific clients or open matters while still addressing real risk scenarios.