A second brain for your practice, living in your own computer

Eight sibling products. Same idea, one edition per jurisdiction. No marketing department, no sales call, no account to create.

You install one edition and you talk to it in ordinary sentences. A receptionist listens to what you type, works out which specialist you actually need, and routes the question. Behind it sit specialists for citations, court lookup, document preparation, bar-conduct compliance, and calendar — each pre-loaded with the statute digests and preparation templates of your own jurisdiction, the ones you would otherwise keep on a shelf behind your desk.

Everything you give it — your matters and your papers, hearing dates, reminders, audit logs — lives in your own home directory. Not on a server of mine, because there isn't one. You can copy that folder to a USB stick and hold your whole practice in your hand.

It is not Magic Circle software and is not trying to be. It is the back office a solo practitioner does not have: the work a junior or a clerk absorbs in a larger chamber. The part that needs a lawyer's judgement is still yours, and every edition says so in its own documentation.

A working day, in commands

• Validate a citation in your own format — AIR 1973 SC 1461, [2023] UKSC 42, ECLI:EU:C:2024:101, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), [2023] SGCA 42, [2023] HKCFI 1234, [2024] DIFC CFI 042, [2024] HCA 12.
• Ask which court has jurisdiction over the matter in front of you, and get the answer from a registrar that knows your own court hierarchy.
• Ask the limitation period for the claim you are looking at — Limitation Act 1963, Limitation Act 1980, BGB §195, the relevant state Act, Cap. 347, whichever applies to your edition.
• Add a hearing date and sync it to your phone through a local calendar feed.
• Run a proposed advertisement or post past the compliance officer before you publish it, and find out whether it touches your bar's publicity rule — BCI Rule 36, the SRA and BSB conduct rules, the CCBE Code, ABA Model Rule 7, LPCR Rule 8, the Solicitors' Conduct Rules, the DIFC Code of Conduct, or the UAE Legal Profession Code.
• Prepare a pleading from a template that belongs to your forum — an Originating Claim under ROC 2021, a CPR N1 claim form, a complaint under the FRCP, an Indian written statement, an Article 263 TFEU application, an HKCFI originating summons.
• Switch between DIFC and Mainland UAE mid-session in the Dubai edition, without either system's context contaminating the other.
• Ask a regulatory threshold — Tranche 2 AML reporting, goAML, BSB risk classification, Section 77 My Health Records — and have it routed to the specialist that actually holds that material.

Three separate facts about privacy, each stated on its own

These are usually blurred together into one reassuring sentence. They are not the same fact and they do not protect you in the same way, so they are set out separately.

Your files never move

Your matters and your papers — parties, hearing dates, reminders, correspondence, compliance records and the audit log — live in ~/.ailawfirm-<jurisdiction>/ on your own machine, in a local database you can copy to a USB stick. I operate no infrastructure that touches it and I cannot read that folder. This holds unconditionally and is not contingent on any setting.

You bring your own key — and it must be a paid one

Where a language model is used, it is reached on your account with your credentials. There is no shared key, no account of mine in the path, and no request of yours passes through anything I run.

The key must be a paid API key, not a consumer subscription. That is a deliberate requirement, not a technical one. A vendor's commercial API terms and its consumer terms are different documents, and the difference is exactly the point that matters to a practitioner. Anthropic, for one, states it plainly: "By default, we will not use your inputs or outputs from our commercial products … to train our models." Its consumer tiers are governed separately. One exception worth knowing on any vendor: if you press a thumbs-up or thumbs-down inside that vendor's own interface, the conversation can be retained and used for training. The brain never sends such feedback.

Six providers are supported — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini, GLM, DeepSeek and MiniMax — plus a fully local model that needs no key at all. Which one you point the brain at is your choice and your relationship, on that vendor's published terms, which you should read. What I can guarantee is narrower, and it is the part that is mine to guarantee: nothing reaches any of them without passing the pseudonymisation gateway first.

Identifiers are stripped before anything leaves

Every outbound request passes through one named component — the pseudonymisation gateway — and it sanitises before it sends and restores after it returns. Names, government identifiers and case references are replaced with neutral placeholders on the way out and put back on the way in. It is not a mode you can forget to switch on: it is a hook on the single function every cloud call funnels through, so there is no second path around it, and it is held in place by tests. See exactly what the swap looks like →

And the strongest setting of all, now in seven of the eight

There is a fully local model tier — the model itself runs on your own laptop and nothing leaves at all. As of 26 August 2026 it is published in seven editions: India, the United Kingdom, the European Union, the United States, Singapore, Hong Kong and Dubai. One command, connect-local, installs it and switches the brain over.

Australia is the exception, and it is named rather than averaged into a count. The code is written but is not yet in the published repository, so an Australian practitioner cannot download it today. That gap matters more in Australia than anywhere else, for the reason set out under section 77 of the My Health Records Act below.

Once it is on, it does not quietly come off. If the local model is unreachable the request fails; it does not fall back to a cloud vendor. A silent fallback would send privileged material out while the product told you it was staying in, which is the precise false assurance this tier exists to remove. An explicit setting in your config also beats a stray cloud key sitting in your shell environment — the deliberate statement wins over the ambient one.

Nobody types this table. A script opens each edition's own source code, checks whether the feature is actually in there, and fills the row in from what it finds. If an edition's code cannot do something, there is no way for the table to say that it can.

What each edition actually knows

The differences are not cosmetic. Each edition carries its own statutes, its own citation grammar, its own court hierarchy, its own identifier formats, and its own conduct rules.

• India
• United Kingdom
• European Union
• United States
• Singapore
• Hong Kong
• Dubai · DIFC
• Australia

The limits, before you find them yourself

• It is not a lawyer and does not supervise itself. Everything it produces is a first version for a qualified practitioner to check. The bar rules it knows about are the same rules that make that your responsibility and not its own.
• It is not a research service with a live case database. It carries statute digests and citation grammar. It does not subscribe to a reporter on your behalf, and it will not pretend a case exists.
• It is version 0.1 in most editions. Where something is roadmap rather than shipped — US state procedure, the local model tier — this site and the repository both say so in those words.
• Pseudonymisation is a safeguard, not a discharge. It reduces exposure. It does not perform your transfer assessment, obtain consent, or answer to your regulator.

Free, and the source is published

MIT licensed. No account, no licence key, no subscription — there is no payment code in any edition, because there is nothing to pay for. Pick your jurisdiction on GitHub and the repository's own README takes you through installation.

All eight editions on GitHub The single-purpose tools