A plain-language guide to what private AI does for a law firm, where it runs, how your data stays yours under Loi 25, what it costs, and how to buy it, written for partners and IT directors, not engineers.
Your associates are already pasting client matters into public AI tools after hours, because the policy says no but the tool in front of them says yes. That is the exposure a private AI removes: it gives lawyers an AI they prefer, on infrastructure you control, with a record of every question.
or 2% of worldwide turnover, the maximum administrative penalty under Loi 25.
Most lawyers already use public AI, usually in browser tabs the firm can’t see, log, or govern.
Corporate clients now send AI & data-security questionnaires before they send work.
Bilbs is the software: a lawyer-facing web app, an admin console, retrieval and inference, identity and access control, an audit log, and the connectors that read your firm’s documents. You provide the infrastructure it runs on, and a free consultation recommends which kind. We never resell hardware at a markup, and your firm’s data is never used to train Bilbs’, Anthropic’s, or anyone else’s models.
Bilbs fits any practice that lives on privileged documents, from a 5-lawyer boutique to a 100-plus-lawyer national firm. It is a particularly strong fit when data residency, Loi 25, or a client’s AI questionnaire requires the AI to live inside the firm.
Boutiques to national firms, 5 to 100-plus lawyers. Four hardware references map to the size of the practice; the platform is the same throughout.
Litigation, corporate, real estate, family, IP, in-house legal departments, and notarial offices. Bilingual French and English by design.
Firms facing Loi 25 obligations, client AI questionnaires, shadow-AI risk, or succession risk on senior rainmakers.
Open-weight models (Llama, Qwen, Gemma, Mistral) served locally with llama.cpp on a GPU server in your office. Fully offline, it can run with the internet cable unplugged. Use hardware you already own, or we source it for you at cost.
The same platform, calling Claude through Amazon Bedrock in your own AWS account and region. No hardware to buy or maintain. Your prompts and documents stay inside your AWS tenancy and are not used to train the model.
Not sure which fits? The free consultation looks at your firm’s size, IT, and confidentiality requirements and recommends a path, with the hardware spec or the Bedrock estimate written down.
Plain-language questions answered from your own documents, every answer cited to the exact source file and paragraph.
First drafts of memos, letters and clauses built from the firm’s own templates and prior work, not a blank page.
Offline Whisper transcription of calls and dictation, and Tesseract OCR (French + English) for scanned PDFs.
Matter-scoped access with role-based permissions, so lawyers only see what they’re entitled to.
Every prompt, answer and citation recorded, exportable for a client questionnaire or an internal review.
Detect and redact personal and privileged information before documents are shared or exported.
On the local path, documents and prompts never leave your building; the server can run air-gapped. On the AWS Bedrock path, everything stays inside your own AWS account and the region you choose, and Claude on Bedrock does not train on your inputs. Either way, access is controlled per matter, every interaction is logged, and answering a client’s “where does our data go?” questionnaire becomes a one-page answer. Loi 25 and PIPEDA were the design constraint, not an afterthought.
On-premise, data never leaves the building and the server can run air-gapped. On Bedrock, it stays in your AWS account and region.
Role-based, matter-scoped permissions. Lawyers see only the matters they’re entitled to; admins manage roles centrally.
Argon2 password hashing with JWT sessions and optional TOTP two-factor. Integrates with your identity directory.
Every prompt, answer and citation recorded and exportable, so “who asked what, when?” has a written answer.
Detect and redact personal and privileged information before anything is shared or exported.
Your files are never used to train Bilbs’, Anthropic’s, or anyone else’s models. Full stop.
A small set of services your IT director can actually reason about: an API for authentication, role-based access and audit; an inference runtime doing retrieval-augmented generation over your documents; an ingestion worker that chunks, embeds and indexes files; and the lawyer and admin web apps. Retrieval uses PostgreSQL + pgvector; embeddings use BGE; jobs run on Redis.
Models are open-weight via llama.cpp on the local path, or Claude via Amazon Bedrock on the cloud path. Authentication is Argon2 + JWT with optional TOTP. Everything ships with a 30 to 50 page runbook so the firm is self-sufficient by design.
Typically 7–8 weeks contract-to-live for a single-server deployment; 18–24 weeks for a national cluster. One practice group goes first; the rest of the firm rolls in once they sign off. We install, stay on call, and own the runbook.
We review your document system, identity, network and GPU situation, then recommend a path in writing. Free.
We deploy the platform on your server or AWS account and connect it to your document system, read-only.
It indexes your matters and learns the firm’s style. Optional fine-tuning sharpens drafting on your precedents.
Two on-site sessions per practice group. Day one looks like the day before, lawyers just open a browser tab.
Indicative references for an on-premise deployment. Use hardware you already own, or we source it at transparent OEM cost. On the Bedrock path there’s no hardware at all.
| Reference | Firm size | Indicative GPU | Form factor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Foundation | 5–10 lawyers | 1× RTX 5090 | Tower |
| Practice | 10–30 lawyers | 2× RTX 5090 | Water-cooled desktop |
| Firm | 30–100 lawyers | 2× RTX 6000 Ada / A100 | 4U rackmount |
| National | 100+ lawyers | 8× A100 SXM | Half-rack (H200/B200 path) |
The free consultation confirms the exact spec, or the Bedrock usage estimate, before you commit. See The Box for full references.
Covers the software, deployment, training, updates and support. One line on the invoice.
Local: a GPU server you own. Use your own, or we source it at transparent OEM cost, no markup.
AWS Bedrock: your AWS Bedrock + Claude API usage, billed by AWS directly to your account.
A free consultation gives you the exact hardware spec or a Bedrock usage estimate before you commit.
A 60-lawyer firm at $99 is $5,940 / month for the platform, one line on the invoice. Infrastructure is separate and at cost: a server you own, or a one-time OEM-cost quote, or metered AWS usage on the Bedrock path.
The fee rises only if you choose add-ons such as the fine-tuning tier or extra integrations. Not included: the infrastructure itself, and your AWS usage on the Bedrock path. We never mark up hardware. Cancellable on 30 days’ notice.
The firm isn’t paying for GPUs or models. It is paying for reclaimed time, reduced risk, and operational leverage. Any one of the three usually covers the fee.
Hours lost to searching, first drafts, onboarding and summarising come back as billable capacity. One day of recovered leakage can cover a quarter of the fee.
A single Loi 25 incident carries a maximum penalty of $10M or 2% of worldwide turnover. Keeping data in the building and logged is cheap insurance against that.
Winning a client’s AI questionnaire, retaining a retiring partner’s know-how, and onboarding faster are each worth multiples of the platform’s price.
Public chatbots and cloud legal-AI tools are strong products. They run as hosted cloud services; Bilbs installs inside the firm. Here is how that plays out.
| Public AI (ChatGPT) | Cloud legal AI | Bilbs | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where data lives | Vendor cloud, often US | Vendor cloud | Your building or your AWS |
| Trained on your files | No | Limited | Yes, and yours to keep |
| On-prem audit log | No | Vendor-side | Yes, on your server |
| Runs offline | No | No | Yes (local path) |
| Loi 25 cross-border | Exposed | Depends on region | Not triggered |
Mutual NDA within 24 hours of the first call. The MSA and privacy agreement are bilingual and already Loi 25-aligned; redlines welcome.
On local deployments the firm owns the trained model outright; the software is licensed to the firm and lives in your IT’s repository. Your data is never used to train anyone’s models.
Hardware carries the manufacturer’s 3-year warranty; we handle the paperwork. A security-questionnaire prefill and attestations are available for procurement.
We install, stay on call, and own the runbook, so your IT director’s weekend isn’t on the hook. And because it runs on your infrastructure, nothing depends on us still being here.
Support within 4 hours, a 24/7 line for Sev-1 emergencies, based in Montréal, Eastern time.
Model refresh, retraining when you add files, security patches, monitoring and backups, all in the fee.
A 30 to 50 page runbook lives on your shared drive, so the firm is self-sufficient by design, not dependent on us.
If we close shop tomorrow, everything you use today keeps working on your own hardware, with the model and runbook in your hands.
Honesty about the limits is part of the diligence. Every answer is grounded in and cited to your own files; if it can’t ground an answer, it says so rather than inventing one. The lawyer always reads the cited source before anything goes out, the same review a partner gives a junior’s draft.
Local suits firms that want everything air-gapped and predictable, with no per-query cost. Bedrock suits firms that prefer no hardware and want Claude’s capability, scaling usage up and down. The consultation recommends one based on your situation.
No. Use hardware you already own, or we source it at transparent OEM cost. We make our money on the platform, not the metal.
Never. On local it never leaves your hardware; on Bedrock it stays in your AWS account and region, and Claude on Bedrock does not train on your inputs.
The software is licensed to your firm and lives in your IT’s repository; on local deployments the trained model is yours to keep, and a printed runbook lives on the shared drive. Everything keeps working.
Bilingually, by design. Lawyers ask in French or English and the AI answers in kind, citing French and English source documents alike. OCR covers both languages for scanned files, and the MSA and privacy agreement are bilingual and Loi 25-aligned.
Yes. It connects, read-only, to the document and practice-management systems you already run (iManage, NetDocuments, SharePoint/M365 and similar) through your existing identity directory, and indexes from there. Billing and time entry don’t change.
Answers are grounded in your own files and cited to the source. If it can’t ground an answer in your indexed material, it says so rather than inventing one, which sharply reduces the hallucinated-paragraph problem. The lawyer still reviews the cited source before anything leaves the firm.
The 45-minute call is free and commits you to nothing. We talk through where your firm stands on shadow AI and Loi 25, and whether the local or Bedrock path fits the way you work.