Private Legal AI

An On-Device Agent for Contract Review, Case-Law Research, and Drafting

A Royal Softworks whitepaper · AssistantGeneral

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Abstract

Legal work is the textbook case for AI that cannot use the cloud. Attorney-client privilege and confidentiality obligations make transmitting matter documents to a third-party AI vendor a professional-responsibility problem — which is why so many firms have banned cloud AI outright. Yet legal work is also document-dense, repetitive at the margins, and exactly the kind of task a capable agent accelerates. AssistantGeneral resolves the tension by running contract analysis, case-law research, and drafting on the lawyer's own machine, with answers tied to source text and a built-in professional disclaimer.

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1. The problem with cloud legal AI

A cloud legal assistant must receive the documents to help with them. For privileged and confidential material, that transmission is itself the risk — regardless of the vendor's no-training promises or regional hosting. Firms are left choosing between a capability they can't ethically use and going without. Meanwhile, generic chat tools that can be used informally produce ungrounded summaries and, notoriously, fabricated citations — which in legal practice is not an inconvenience but a sanctionable event.

2. The AssistantGeneral approach

AssistantGeneral runs the legal stack locally:

• The model, the document index, the embeddings, and the generated drafts all stay on the machine. A cloud model is attached only if the firm explicitly permits it through policy.
• A dedicated Lawyer agent carries a non-negotiable disclaimer ("general information, not legal advice — consult a licensed attorney") and a tool set scoped to legal work.
• The groundedness gate checks the draft's claims against retrieved evidence and re-grounds unsupported ones before the answer is shown — directly addressing the fabricated-citation failure mode.

3. Capabilities, mapped to real work

AssistantGeneral ships a library of legal workflows that run against the firm's own embedded documents:

Contract analysis

• Clause extraction — dates, obligations, termination rights, liability caps, and payment terms pulled into a structured table.
• Red-flag review — one-sided, unusual, or missing clauses surfaced with plain-English explanations.
• NDA comparison — two confidentiality agreements diffed on scope, term, obligations, and remedies.
• Contract expiry tracking — a timeline of renewal windows and key dates across the contract set.

Research

• Case-law search — find on-point opinions, cited by case name and citation, with a preference for controlling jurisdiction and recent decisions.
• Statutory interpretation — relevant provisions retrieved from the firm's statute library and explained in plain English with practical guidance.
• Jurisdiction comparison — how a topic or obligation is treated across jurisdictions.

Drafting

• Contract template population — employment agreements, SLAs, NDAs, consultancy and licensing agreements drafted from a plain-English deal description.
• Letter before action — formal LBAs for debt recovery, breach, and property disputes.
• Clause library lookup — retrieve the firm's pre-approved standard clauses.

Compliance

• Privacy policy auditor — GDPR/CCPA gap analysis with remediation steps.
• Data Processing Agreement checker — verification against GDPR Article 28.

Operations

• Matter intake and a legal FAQ bot over firm materials.

4. How it stays grounded

Every analysis runs over the firm's own materials, ingested into a private knowledge base. The hybrid retriever (vector + keyword search, fused and reranked) returns the exact passages the answer relies on, with citation highlight spans — so a clause finding points to the clause. The groundedness gate then verifies the draft against that evidence and re-retrieves for any claim that isn't supported. The Lawyer agent is instructed to quote the source text it relies on and never to assert a definitive legal conclusion.

5. The interface matches the work

A Legal UI preset presents a document-centric layout with voice and external connectors hidden — the interface a legal team actually wants, not a general-purpose chat window.

6. For the firm: governance

When a firm standardizes on AssistantGeneral, the enterprise governance plane (running on the firm's own server) provides a shared, access-controlled clause and precedent knowledge base, single sign-on, an audit trail, and a policy that can pin every seat to the on-device model. No client material ever crosses a vendor boundary.

7. Scope and responsibility

AssistantGeneral is a drafting and analysis aid for legal professionals, not a substitute for legal judgment. Its output is general information requiring attorney review; the product states this in every relevant interaction. The value is leverage on the mechanical 80% — extraction, comparison, first drafts, research starting points — under the lawyer's supervision, on data that never leaves the firm.

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Evaluate it offline, on a real (redacted) matter, on your own laptop. Contact Royal Softworks.