Trust, security, and privacy
Lawyers and institutions have always had a confidential system for their legal thinking. Briefcase builds it for everyone else: a private place to work on the most sensitive matters in your life, kept private by how it is built.
If a court orders Briefcase to produce
If a court orders Briefcase to produce
Your conversations with Briefcase leave no transcript. Not a copy, not a summary, not a topic. What remains is that a conversation happened, when, with which model, and what it cost.
Briefcase keeps the record you approve and the metadata it takes to run the service. Nothing else exists to produce. Every question a person is right to ask before trusting software with their legal life has an answer here.
Could what I say to Briefcase be used against me later?
Your conversations with Briefcase leave no transcript.
Not a copy, not a summary, not a topic. Briefcase keeps that a conversation happened, when, with which model, and what it cost. Save an answer and it joins your Matter, by your hand, and only then.
Can a court order Briefcase to hand over my Matter?
What Briefcase never kept, it cannot hand over.
What can be produced is bounded by what Briefcase retains and can read: the record you approve, the messages you choose to send, and the metadata it takes to run the service. A demand meets valid legal process, narrowing, the minimum the law compels, and notice to you when the law permits.
Can someone at Briefcase read my documents?
No one at Briefcase has standing access. Nobody at all can read a sealed Matter.
Matter content is reachable only by one dedicated processing identity. Support sees metadata, and any human exception is break-glass: justified, time-boxed, and audited. Seal a Matter and it is encrypted under a key only you hold, not support, not an engineer, not our AI. Ask Briefcase to work on it and your key goes only to a verified, sealed workload that keeps nothing when the run ends. You decide what is sealed, and when it opens.
Is my legal life training an AI?
Your matters train no model, ours or a provider's.
Private legal content routes only to models eligible for zero retention by contract, inside one managed model plane under Briefcase's enterprise account. The model provider cannot reach the deployment, its logs, its prompts, or its completions.
Who else can see what I put in?
The people you grant, and no one else.
Sharing is by grant, never by link, and you can grant only what you hold. No advertiser, no data broker, no analytics vendor, and no model provider training a model.
What if I want it gone?
Export is complete and deletion is real.
You can take the record out in usable form and delete it, and the deletion propagates to every derived system, so no copy is stranded. Where a Matter is sealed, deleting the key is the deletion.
Is what I put in Briefcase privileged?
Protection comes from the law and the circumstances, and Briefcase preserves the facts it depends on.
Using Briefcase creates no privilege by itself. Materials a self-represented person prepares in anticipation of litigation may qualify for work-product protection, and Briefcase keeps the facts for asserting it: minimal disclosure, disciplined retention, and the context in which the work was created. Federal trial courts have protected exactly that kind of preparation as work product.
See the recordThe commitments
Your conversations, documents, evidence, and legal work will never become someone else's product.
We do not sell your legal data, use it for advertising, or use your private matters to train public AI models. The information you entrust to Briefcase is used to serve you, not to build a business around your data.
We make Briefcase a private place to work on the most sensitive matters in your life.
That means minimizing the information we collect, limiting who and what can access it, encrypting it, isolating sensitive legal work, and choosing AI and infrastructure partners that are contractually and technically restricted from using your information for their own purposes.
We preserve the strongest confidentiality the law and technology allow, while being clear about what is private, what may be legally protected, and what is not.
Briefcase preserves the strongest available facts for asserting a protection: minimal disclosure and retention, private preparation kept apart from shared content, and the context in which the work was created. Any protection comes from the law and the circumstances.
How it is built
Written for a court clerk, a partner, and a diligence team, in the same words the security record uses.
Every request is authorized from current server-side state. Nothing is trusted for being inside the network or for carrying a claim: a session carries identity only, and membership resolves on every request.
Every principal, human or machine, holds only the permissions its one job needs. Runtime database principals own nothing and cannot turn row security off. Administrative reads run through a separate, audited operator path that is denied tenant content outright.
Every tenant's data sits behind row-level security in the database itself, and an isolation suite runs on every change, so a change that would weaken the boundary fails before it ships. Metadata is confidential too: not the document, not the title, not the fact that it exists.
Durable content is encrypted under keys Briefcase controls, one per environment and data class. Restricted matter content is envelope-encrypted per object, and one dedicated processing identity is the only principal that can decrypt it. A sealed Matter is the exception, under a key only you hold.
Models read structured Matter state and return results. A conversation with Briefcase leaves no transcript and no content-derived record: no copy, summary, topic, tag, embedding, or content hash. The content-free run record is kept.
Private legal content routes only to models eligible for zero retention by contract, inside one managed model plane under Briefcase's enterprise account. The model provider cannot reach the deployment, its logs, its prompts, or its completions. A model that carries any retention is never used for matter content.
Seal a Matter and it is encrypted on your device under a key only you hold. Ask Briefcase to work on it and your key goes only to a verified, sealed workload that keeps nothing when the run ends. You decide what is sealed, and when it opens.
Every input from outside is decoded against a schema at the edge and rejected on failure. Retrieved material is data, never instructions. Moderation screens both directions, and unsafe output is gated before a chunk reaches the reader.
Every worker, function, and agent run authenticates as its own identity with short-lived credentials. No long-lived key exists, and every agent run carries a signed identity, so every action it takes is attributable after the fact.
The AI answers from the record you are entitled to use and cites it. When the record does not support an answer, Briefcase says so and points to a next step. A guardrail rejects advice-shaped output; individualized advice exists only inside a professional engagement you chose.
Every control is policy-as-code, a test that runs before a change integrates and again on deployment. A failing control blocks the change and names the fix. Privileged surfaces are audited, and the evidence is collected as the work happens.
Private processing
Your key opens a sealed Matter only inside a workload that has proved what it is running, and that workload keeps nothing when the run ends. No one at Briefcase can see inside it.
Your Matter is sealed on your device, under a key only you hold.
Before the key is released, the workload proves what it is running.
Your key and the sealed Matter go only to that verified workload.
Inside, the Matter opens in memory and the work is done. No one at Briefcase can see in.
The result comes back sealed, and opens on your device.
The run ends. The key and the plaintext are destroyed. The workload keeps nothing.
Legal process
Your conversations with Briefcase leave no transcript, so the thinking you do with it does not exist to produce. What can be produced is bounded by what Briefcase retains and can read: the record you approve, the messages you choose to send, and the metadata it takes to run the service.
When someone seeks access to your information
We require valid legal process.
We narrow an overbroad demand.
We disclose only what the law compels.
We notify you when the law permits, so you can assert your own rights.
The limits
Privacy is not privilege. These limits are stated here, once, because a false promise about confidentiality is the one failure a person cannot recover from.
The record
Two federal trial courts have protected a self-represented person's AI-assisted preparation as work product, and one denied it on a criminal record where the defendant acted apart from counsel. No court of appeals has decided the question. None of the three shows that Briefcase creates privilege or work product: protection comes from the law and the circumstances, and architecture preserves or undermines the facts it depends on.
E.D. Mich., 2026
What the court held
The court protected a self-represented civil litigant's AI-assisted materials as work product and rejected the argument that using ChatGPT alone waived it. Generative AI programs, the court wrote, are tools, not persons.
What Briefcase takes from it
Using an AI tool to prepare your own case is not, by itself, a disclosure that defeats protection.
D. Colo., 2026
What the court held
With Heppner before it, the court protected a self-represented litigant's AI-assisted preparation as work product: a pro se litigant is simultaneously the party and the advocate, and AI interactions do not automatically compromise work product protections.
What Briefcase takes from it
What matters is who prepared the material and why. A person preparing their own case is the party the rule protects.
S.D.N.Y., 2026
What the court held
On the record before the court, independent use of a public consumer AI platform created no attorney-client privilege. Provider terms permitting collection, training use, and third-party disclosure also defeated a reasonable expectation of confidentiality, and the court found waiver when otherwise privileged information was shared with the platform and provider. Work-product protection was separately rejected under the law the court applied, in a criminal case where the defendant acted apart from counsel.
What Briefcase takes from it
Confidentiality architecture is legally consequential. No-training terms, provider zero retention, restricted disclosure, scoped access, and disciplined retention remove the facts that defeated confidentiality there.
These decisions stand on settled law for the self-represented person. The Supreme Court has held each part of it. You may plead your own cause. What you file is read fairly. You may be helped.
Faretta v. California
422 U.S. 806 (1975)
“in all the courts of the United States, the parties may plead and manage their own causes personally”
The right to represent yourself has been federal law since 1789, is codified at 28 U.S.C. § 1654, and is a constitutional right in a criminal trial. Thirty-six state constitutions confer it in terms.
Haines v. Kerner
404 U.S. 519 (1972)
“less stringent standards than formal pleadings drafted by lawyers”
A court reads what a self-represented person files generously. Erickson v. Pardus reaffirmed it in 2007: a document filed pro se is to be liberally construed.
Johnson v. Avery
393 U.S. 483 (1969)
“the power of the States to control the practice of law cannot be exercised so as to abrogate federally protected rights”
A State may not bar help from someone who is not a lawyer and offer nothing in its place.
Standards
Briefcase operates against SOC 2 control expectations, pursues independent examination, and publishes attestation status exactly as earned. It claims a completed SOC 2 report only after an auditor issues one.
CCPA- and GDPR-grade access, deletion, data-processing terms, and data-minimization practices are the baseline for every user, in every jurisdiction.
Security is continuous. The isolation suite and the wider test gate run on every change, privileged surfaces are audited, and the evidence is collected as the work happens.
Briefcase is a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation. Its public benefit is written into the corporate form, and directors balance it alongside stockholder interests and the interests of those materially affected by the company's conduct.
Join the waitlist and Briefcase will be in touch as access opens.
Pilots start as early as October 1, 2026.