Law Firms
Autopilot Assistant produces the first draft of your routine client correspondence — reporting letters, engagement letters, standard demand letters. It works from the precedents and closed files you give it, on a private virtual machine used by your firm alone, and you read, change and sign every word before it leaves, because the letter is yours under your own law society's rules whatever helped produce it.
It is nine in the evening and you are writing the reporting letter again. Most of it is the letter you sent on a different file last Tuesday, and you know that because you have the last matter open in the other window, copying across and changing the four things that changed. It is not hard work. It is not billable work either, and it is the reason you are still here. What you will not do is paste a client's affairs into a free chatbot to save the evening — you hold their business in strict confidence, the letter goes out under your name, and you sign it, so you own it.
Two answers, and a client is entitled to both. The assistant runs on a private virtual machine provisioned for your business alone, and it connects only to the mail, calendar, Drive and repositories you choose. Those machines sit in the United States; we operate no Canadian region, so the file does not stay in your building, your province or this country. Under the Office of the Privacy Commissioner's cross-border guidance the organisation that transfers personal information remains accountable for it, must secure comparable protection primarily by contract, and individuals should be told their information may be processed in a foreign country — telling your clients that is your job, not ours. The full treatment is on our privacy page.
Yes, and that is not a courtesy we extend — it is the rule you already practise under. The LSO's April 2024 white paper is blunt: licensees assume complete professional responsibility for their practice of law whether they receive assistance from non-licensees or technological tools, and where work is created using generative AI it remains the licensee's responsibility to ensure it is their product and reflects their expert legal opinion. Autopilot produces a draft in a .docx file. You open it in Word, cut the paragraph you never liked, fix the tone, and sign it.
No. The Law Society of British Columbia states directly that it cannot endorse any product or tool. Its guidance says only that issues with confidentiality, especially with publicly accessible free tools, may lead a firm to create or purchase its own bespoke AI solution, and that a private tool using only information provided by the firm might help avoid some of the confidentiality concerns it identifies. That is a hedge and we are not going to dress it up as more. If a vendor tells you a regulator has approved their product, ask them to show you the document.
It is good at the parts that are identical to last week: the reporting letter that follows the same shape every time, the engagement letter that changes in four places, the standard demand letter, the schedule of enclosures. It is not a research tool and you should not ask it for law. Give it your precedents and your facts, and check every citation, date and figure yourself before anything goes out.
No. You already have the raw material, scattered across closed matters. Autopilot reads the documents you point it at, including PDFs, and keeps a thread across a task, so the shape of your standard letter can be assembled from what you have already sent rather than written fresh. What comes out is a draft in your wording, not a generic one.
Word documents (.docx), PDFs, laid-out documents rendered from HTML and CSS for things like invoices and proposals, spreadsheets (.xlsx), slides (.pptx), charts, QR codes and small scripts. It reads PDFs back and handles non-Latin text, which matters if your client correspondence is not all in English or French. It also works with spreadsheets and figures and handles receipts and bookkeeping, so the disbursement summary and the file's numbers are inside the same assistant as the letters. That is the complete list; if a format is not on it, the assistant does not make it.
It can act later on a schedule and hold a thread across a task, so a recurring piece of drafting can be started without you and waiting when you sit down. That work is usually not billable. We will not tell you how many hours this gives back, because nobody has measured that for a Canadian solo practice and we are not going to invent the number.
Three things, and we would rather you hear them now than in month two. Autopilot's memory is shared by everyone at the business rather than kept private per person, which is a real question for a firm with conflicts or ethical-wall obligations. Deleting a chat conversation does not erase the assistant's own copy. And LSBC notes that the law of privilege in respect of generative AI tools is at an early stage and likely to emerge over time, including possible waiver arguments — so nobody, us included, can tell you today that privilege is safe.
An illustration, using an invented firm and an invented file. Nothing here is a customer, and no real Canadian firm, lawyer or matter is described. Take a purchaser's reporting letter in a two-lawyer residential real estate practice. Its anatomy barely moves from file to file: the covering paragraph, the property description, the adjustments carried over from the statement, the list of enclosures, the tax note, the closing instruction about the duplicate certificate. What changes is the address, the numbers, one paragraph of tax treatment, and whether there is a mortgage. In the illustration, the assistant is given access to one Drive folder of closed real estate files and the firm's mailbox — nothing else. It is sent the statement of adjustments and the registration confirmation for the invented file, and asked for a reporting letter in the shape of the last three the firm sent. It returns a .docx: the covering paragraph and the standing sections in the firm's own wording, the adjustments carried across into a table, the enclosures listed. Then comes the part that cannot be delegated. The lawyer reads the draft against the file, rewrites the tax paragraph because this purchaser is a first-time buyer, deletes a sentence the firm has always disliked, checks every figure against the statement personally, and signs it. What is saved is not the letter. What is saved is starting from the firm's own draft rather than from another client's matter, and doing the checking once rather than writing and checking at the same time. What the illustration does not show, because it would not be true: it does not show a regulator's approval, and it does not show anyone skipping the review.
Autopilot runs on a private virtual machine provisioned for your business, it reads only the mail, calendar, Drive and repositories you point it at, and everything is processed in the United States with no Canadian region. What is stored, for how long, and under what contract is an answer to get from us in writing before any client material goes in, because that is the answer you can hold us to. Measure the reply against the LSO white paper's instruction not to input confidential or privileged information without ensuring adequate security measures are in place, including understanding and adjusting the tool's privacy and data-security settings.
No. Deleting a chat conversation removes it from your view; it does not erase the assistant's own copy. The Law Society of BC ties AI tool selection to the records rules, including the requirement that a storage provider destroy records completely and permanently on the lawyer's instructions. If that rule governs you, put the question to us directly and get the answer before you commit.
There is no single national answer. The Law Society of BC calls disclosure prudent under the honesty-and-candour duty; the Federal Court's May 2024 notice requires a declaration in the first paragraph of a litigation document containing content created or generated directly by AI, but expressly not where AI merely suggested changes or critiqued content a human already wrote — and that notice covers Federal Court filings, not client correspondence. Other courts and other law societies have their own positions. Read your own regulator, and assume separately that the duty to tell clients their information is processed outside Canada is yours to carry.
Treat everything it produces as a draft from an assistant who has not been called to the bar, and see the section above on what never to ask it. In Zhang v. Chen, 2024 BCSC 285, a BC lawyer filed an application relying on two cases invented by ChatGPT; costs were awarded against her personally and she was ordered to review all her files for ChatGPT use and notify opposing parties and the court. Point this tool at your boilerplate, check every citation and every figure yourself, and do not ask it to find you law.
It might, and you should think it through before you buy. Autopilot's memory is shared by everyone at the business rather than kept private per person, so a firm with ethical walls or conflicts obligations has a genuine constraint on how it could use the assistant. Raise it on the call and we will tell you what the assistant can and cannot be scoped to.
Any one assistant is $99 a month, any two $149, all three $199, in Canadian dollars. Autopilot Assistant is the one that drafts; the other two answer the practice telephone and sign visitors in at the door. There is no self-serve signup, because a person sets the assistant up with you — that person is who you meet on the call.
Setting this up is our work, not a form you fill in. We go through your wording with you, and you can change any of it afterwards.
Digital Front Desk