Why local tools
Legal research pays off the second time it is needed. The question worth asking about any tool is what remains a year later, and who else can open it.
| Chat window | Hosted platform | Local work | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where sources live | pasted into the session | their corpus, plus your uploads | on your disk |
| A claim resolves to | the model’s wording | a cite in their format | a verbatim passage and its location |
| What leaves the machine | whatever you paste | the file | text with the names already replaced |
| What outlives the session | a transcript | the workspace, while you subscribe | the folder |
| Who can reopen it | whoever has the account | whoever holds a seat | anyone you give the folder to |
| Which model runs it | theirs | theirs | local or hosted, your call |
What remains
Section titled “What remains”Chat window. A chat session holds its work for the length of the session. The transcript stays with the account that made it, so the same question reaching a colleague next spring is new work again.
The quotation. In a chat window the model writes the quotation, reproducing it from context. A quoting tool lifts the passage out of the file and records where it sits.
Hosted platform. Hosted platforms are built around a licensed corpus. What decides a case often sits outside it: a client’s papers, a municipality’s internal guidance, a meddelelse from Rigsadvokaten, a paper the licensed set never indexed. Those go up as uploads regardless, under someone else’s retention terms.
Ordinary files
Section titled “Ordinary files”The folder survives all of it. It reads without any of these tools and files like any other work product. Ordinary files are what make the rest possible.
More than one harnessPoint a different agent at the same matter, or run two on it at once.
Not bound to one.The process in GitCommits are the research history: which sources went in, which quotes were kept, which draft replaced which.
The history is the work.Your work, keptA finished memo and its quotations can sit with the rest of your files, and with other memos, for the next question.
Ready for the next matter.More than one readingNamed jobs accumulate on the same documents. The next question has every earlier result in the folder.
Earlier jobs stay.Your templatesLoad the house memo, the house fact sheet, the house citation format. The agent follows yours.
Yours, not ours.