Private AI for law firms in Halifax

Nova Scotia firms answer to the Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society’s rules on confidentiality and, as private organisations, to the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act. The professional duty runs with the file regardless of who hosts the software.

Smaller firms carry the same obligations as large ones with a fraction of the support, which is why plain-language policy grounding beats a sophisticated configuration nobody has time to maintain.

Halifax carries Atlantic Canada’s largest legal community alongside a distinct ocean-economy practice in shipping, fisheries, offshore energy and defence procurement.

Firms are smaller than their Ontario counterparts and less able to absorb a research task that eats an afternoon.

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 Halifax 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.

Halifax 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: