1Clients are asking where their data goes.
Client security questionnaires and outside counsel guidelines now include AI clauses. Many require you to disclose which AI tools touch their files, and some prohibit sending client material to public AI services at all. Cyber insurers have started asking the same questions.
The question isn't whether your firm will use AI. It's whether client files leave the building when it does.
2Your people are already using AI.
If the firm doesn't provide an approved tool, someone is pasting a draft into a consumer chatbot tonight. Banning AI doesn't stop that. Giving people a better tool, one that's faster and already connected to the firm's documents, does.
3Local models are now good enough.
Open-weight language models running on a single server in your office can now draft, summarize, compare documents, and answer questions across your files with citations to the source. You own the hardware, so the cost is fixed instead of growing with every seat and every query.
4What we do about it.
We size and install the hardware, deploy and tune the models, connect them to your document system with the same permissions and ethical walls you already enforce, and write the policy that governs their use. Then we manage it along with the rest of your IT, because private AI is only as secure as the network it runs on.