Private AI for law firms in Edmonton

An Alberta law firm holds client information under the Law Society of Alberta’s rules of professional conduct and, as a private organisation, under the Personal Information Protection Act. Confidentiality is a professional duty owed to the client, independent of any privacy statute.

The question a firm should be able to answer before using any AI tool is the one a client may ask: where is my file, who can see it, and can it be deleted when the matter closes.

Edmonton is the province’s legislative and administrative centre, so its legal work leans toward government, administrative law, health law and the Crown side of the table.

Understanding a regulation quickly, and being able to point at the section, is the day-to-day need — more than drafting volume.

Stored data — accounts, conversations, memory and files — sits in Canada, in AWS Canada Central (Montréal). The models that write answers run on NVIDIA GPU hardware located in Canada and operated from Canada. That second part is the one most vendors gloss: storage residency is not the same claim as inference residency, and for a Edmonton firm the difference is exactly the one a privacy review will ask about.

If the requirement is that nothing leaves infrastructure you control, Digby can be self-hosted with Docker Compose against any OpenAI-compatible model server. That is a different trade — you run it — and it is documented rather than implied.

1. 01

   Start with know-how, not matters

   put the firm manual and standard forms in a project and let people ask about their own procedures first.

2. 02

   Then one closed matter

   a file already resolved, so the team can check the answers against the record.

3. 03

   Write the rule down before opening it up

   what may go in, what never does, who reviews an output before it is used.

Edmonton firms and organisations often work across provincial lines, and the statute changes at the border. The same law firms material, set up for the next province over: