AI Privacy for law firms & legal teams

What ships out of the box

The legal preset is one of the four built-in industry presets in SOWA Privacy and covers law-firm and in-house legal workflows directly. It is one click away in Settings → Detection → PII Presets, and you can compose it with other presets via Custom rules & lists.

Legal preset – clients / cases / parties

Captures the vocabulary of cases, parties, courts, and instruments. The examples below show common English legal vocabulary; add firm-specific terms via the custom Blacklist.

The preset layers on top of the always-on regex packs – emails, phone numbers, IBAN, BIC/SWIFT, credit card numbers, national tax IDs, and a dozen others.

Why this matters for law firms & legal teams

Attorney-client privilege

Privilege is paper-thin once data crosses an organisational boundary. Pasting privileged correspondence into a public AI tool may not, on its own, waive the privilege under every jurisdiction – but it is almost always treated as a disclosure to a third-party processor, with all the consent and audit obligations that come with it. SOWA Privacy flips the default: the AI sees [CLIENT_1] and [CASE_2], not the names and case numbers.

Local detection – zero data egress

Detection runs entirely in the browser. No SOWA Privacy server sees your prompt content. The optional NER model is downloaded once from HuggingFace and then runs offline; the optional WebLLM model runs on the local GPU. The only network call SOWA Privacy makes (other than the AI vendor you chose) is a sparse entitlement check that contains no PII, no prompts, and no audit data.

Tailor it to your firm or legal department

• Add firm-specific identifiers (matter numbers, internal client IDs, deal codes) to the Blacklist in Settings.
• Add safe boilerplate (your firm name, jurisdiction names, public-record reference numbers) to the Whitelist.
• Export the resulting preset as .sowa.json and ship it to every workstation via an IT policy.