Law firms

AI for law firms, with client confidences kept out.

Updated September 24, 2026 · SOPHIA XT LLC

The risk

Associates and staff use AI to summarize depositions, draft letters and tidy memos. Each of those prompts tends to carry the client's name, the matter and the facts. Formal Opinion 512 points out that a self-learning tool may surface what one user typed to another user later, and that a lawyer must understand what a tool does with the input before using it with client information.

The rules that apply

Model Rule 1.6. Rule 1.6 forbids revealing information relating to the representation without informed consent, and paragraph (c) requires reasonable efforts to prevent its inadvertent or unauthorized disclosure. Your state's version of the rule is what binds you; most follow the model rule closely.

ABA Formal Opinion 512. Issued July 29, 2024 (the opinion, ABA summary), it applies the duties of competence, confidentiality, communication, supervision and reasonable fees to generative AI. It says informed client consent is required before putting information relating to a representation into a self-learning AI tool, and that boilerplate consent in an engagement letter is not enough. It also reminds managing and supervising lawyers of their duties under Rules 5.1 and 5.3 to set clear policies on AI use and to train staff.

Keeping the identifying details out of the prompt is one of the reasonable efforts Rule 1.6(c) asks for. It does not remove every question the opinion raises, such as checking the AI's output and billing fairly for time saved.

How Safe-Desk works in a law office

Staff keep using ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity or DeepSeek. The Safe-Desk extension for Chrome and Edge, or the Safe-Desk Windows app for the ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot desktop apps, checks each message before it leaves. Client data becomes a placeholder such as [SSN_1], and only that version reaches the AI provider. When the answer comes back, the staff member who sent it sees the real values again; nobody else does. Passwords, keys and text marked privileged are stopped and sent nowhere. The owner gets a log of who sent what kind of data and which rule caught it, never the value itself, plus phone alerts and a monthly report. See how it works and the security page.

What the law firm template catches

Pick Law firms at sign-up. Text marked privileged or attorney work product is stopped outright, so a memo headed that way never reaches the AI. The owner can change names, places and dates to off, flag or protect, paste the client list, and add custom topics such as a matter's code name.

Read from the Law firms template in the product. In strict mode, messages with identifiers such as SSNs and account numbers are stopped instead of swapped.

A worked example

The staff member reads the answer with the real values back in. The log names what kind of data was caught, never the values.

Text marked privileged is stopped. Nothing is sent to the AI.

What it does not do

Safe-Desk does not make a firm compliant on its own and does not certify compliance. It has not been audited for SOC 2. It does not sign a Business Associate Agreement, so it is not for patient information. Names, addresses and dates are caught from your client list and from context; context detection is a best effort, because names have no checksum. Anything your firm sets to Flag is sent as written and reported to the owner.

Safe-Desk does not check whether the AI's answer is right. Rule 1.1 and Opinion 512 still expect a lawyer to review AI output before relying on it.

Setup and price

Safe-Desk costs $19 per staff member a month, with a 14-day free trial. Each seat includes $5 of AI a month inside Safe-Desk, pooled across the firm, and AI beyond that is billed at the model's cost plus 30%. Using your own ChatGPT or Claude through the extension or the connector costs nothing extra. Optional setup: we set it up for $149 for up to 10 staff, $10 for each extra person. A firm with no IT person can ask us to set it up; everything we do on your behalf is written to the firm's activity trail.

Related

• A ChatGPT and AI use policy for small firmsWhat the policy should say, and a one-page sample to copy.
• Is it safe to use ChatGPT with client data?What happens to what you type, business versus consumer plans, and the rules that apply.
• How Safe-Desk compares with the other ways to keep client data out of AIEnterprise DLP, browser-only extensions, private workspaces and banning AI, side by side.
• SecurityWhat we keep, what we never keep, and every subprocessor.