The challenge
The firm sat on years of contracts, filings and case law, but the knowledge was effectively locked away — answers lived in lawyers’ heads or in documents nobody had time to re-read. Public AI tools were off the table: client confidentiality and mandate boundaries made it unacceptable to send privileged material to an external model, and any answer that couldn’t be traced back to a source was worthless in legal work.
What we built
We built a private GPT for the firm using retrieval-augmented generation over its own contracts and case law. Every answer is grounded in retrieved passages and returned with citations pointing back to the exact source document, so a lawyer can verify the reasoning in seconds. Access is mandate-scoped: the assistant only retrieves from the matters a given user is permitted to see, and nothing leaves the firm’s controlled environment.
Results
The assistant is live and gives lawyers a way to interrogate their own knowledge base in plain language, with citations they can trust and confidentiality they can defend. Research that meant manually hunting through folders now starts with a question and a sourced answer. The firm turned a dormant document archive into a private, mandate-aware advisor.