Law firms · Ottawa, ON

Private AI for law firms in Ottawa

Ottawa law firms and in-house legal teams work inside Ontario’s own rules. Digby answers from your documents with the passage attached, keeps stored data in Canada, and runs the models on Canadian-located hardware — so the answer is checkable and the question “where does it go” has a short reply.

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What Ontario asks of a law firm

Ontario law firms are bound by the Law Society of Ontario’s rules of professional conduct on confidential information and by the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act as a commercial activity. The professional obligation is stricter than the statute and does not bend for convenience.

The Law Society has been explicit that technology is not exempt from these duties: a lawyer who puts client information into a system must understand where it goes and who can reach it.

How Digby describes its own limits AI for Canadian law firms — the national page

Ottawa’s legal reality

Ottawa’s bar is built around the federal government: regulatory, procurement, immigration, intellectual property and constitutional practice, often with bilingual filing requirements.

Reading a long instrument quickly, and being able to say which provision governs, is most of the work.

What Digby does — and what we do not claim

Digby does not give legal advice, does not replace a lawyer’s judgement, and must never be the only reader of a document that carries a deadline. It reads and retrieves; a human signs.

01
Know-how Q&A
ask the firm’s own manual, precedents and standard forms a question and get the passage it came from.
02
Matter-file reading
put a closed file in a project and ask what the retainer covered, what the limitation period was, what the client actually instructed.
03
Contract review support
summarise a draft, list the unusual clauses, and flag where it departs from your standard wording, with the clause quoted.
04
Research with sources
current statutes and regulations, with links a junior can check before the answer reaches a partner.

Where the data lives, and where the models run

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 Ottawa 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.

Where Digby’s inference and storage actually are Run Digby on your own servers What private AI means at Digby

A sensible first month for a Ottawa firm

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.
02
Then one closed matter
a file already resolved, so the team can check the answers against the record.
03
Write the rule down before opening it up
what may go in, what never does, who reviews an output before it is used.

Other Canadian cities

Ottawa 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:

Law Firm · Montréal Law Firm · Québec City Law Firm · Halifax AI for every Canadian industry

Frequently asked questions

What do the Law Society of Ontario rules say about AI and client information?

Confidential information under the rules must be protected, and a lawyer must be competent in the technology they choose to use — which includes understanding where information is stored and who can access it. Those duties apply to the tool, not just to the assistant using it.

Can a Toronto firm use Digby for contract review?

For review support yes — summarising a draft, listing unusual clauses, comparing against your standard wording, with each point quoting the clause. The lawyer reviews and signs; Digby does not give legal advice.

What does Digby cost for a Ottawa firm?

Free to start, billed in Canadian dollars: the entry point is CAD $0 and no account is needed to begin. For larger engagements — more seats, more volume or a dedicated deployment — pricing is set with you rather than listed here, so contact us and a person replies with a written number. Heavier features such as deep research have daily limits.