This is the part of the product we spent the most time getting right, because it is the part a careful firm has to trust before it trusts anything else. We call it the privilege gate. Its whole job is to make sure the line is drawn before the send, not after.

What it actually is

When you ask the assistant to draft, summarise or extract, some text is about to leave your browser and go to an AI model. The privilege gate is the check that runs in that moment, in your browser, on your machine, before the send, on exactly the text that would leave.

It does three things. It classifies what is about to go out. When you send a request, it shows you precisely what is going out; the automatic summary made when you upload a document passes the same check. And where the material is privileged, it acts on that before a single byte reaches the model.

The point is the timing. Most tools, if they check at all, check after the upload has happened. By then the disclosure is done. We built the gate to sit in front of the send, so the decision is always yours to make while it still means something.

Warn, then hard-block

Not every situation calls for the same response, so the gate has two.

Where privileged material would leave, the gate warns you first. It surfaces what is about to go out and lets you decide: send it, hold it back, or edit it down to only what the step needs. In England and Wales, legal professional privilege is your client's right and your duty; the gate treats the send as a decision only you can take, and it makes sure you take it knowingly rather than by accident.

Where a professional-secrecy duty is absolute, where the law does not leave room for a judgement call, the gate does not merely warn. It hard-blocks. The material does not leave, full stop, because there the right answer is not "are you sure?" but "no". Building both responses meant the gate could match the strictness of the duty instead of flattening every case into a single warning.

You decide, every time

On the attended UK AI path, the gate waits on a per-request warning for protected or unknown material. The attending solicitor can explicitly override it for that request; if nobody answers or they decline, the request is refused. The record captures a product decision only: it does not establish client authority or decide whether privilege is waived. This boundary must not be generalised to every consequential product step.

Because the case file lives in your own encrypted vault and the check runs in your browser, there is no cloud bucket of ours filling up in the background. If you close the tab, the file stays where it always was, in your vault, under your control.

Why it is architecture, not a policy

Plenty of tools promise good behaviour in a data-handling policy. A policy is a claim about what a server will do with a file you have already handed over. The privilege gate is different in kind: the file never has to be handed over for the tool to work, and the check that decides what leaves runs on your side of the line.

That is the answer to the privilege question that a cloud-first tool cannot give without rebuilding itself: because it drew its first line in the wrong place. We drew ours before the send, and everything the gate does follows from that.

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