With AI, legal professional secrecy hangs on three things: where the processing happens, who is contractually bound, and what can be evidenced afterwards. This page describes, for all three points, what is actually set up in a Law Flow environment. And it names where the limits lie.
The request leaves the computer encrypted and goes to your own AWS account. From there it calls the language model, which is operated inside the EU. The answer comes back the same way. The content of the request is not stored in the process, neither at AWS nor at the model provider, and it is not used for training.
The path out of the EU is not deselected, it is blocked. We set this block at the level of the organisation, above the individual accounts. It holds even when someone with administrator rights wants to configure something else.
An AWS account does not become defensible under professional conduct rules by being opened. None of what follows is in the contract with AWS. All of it has to be done by someone.
Administration sits in an account of its own, the daily work in a second one. The account with the far-reaching permissions is hardened and is not used day to day.
An account-wide block (Service Control Policy) refuses every call outside the EU as well as the globally distributed model profiles. The block applies to administrators too and cannot be lifted from inside the account.
Separate users via AWS Identity Center, each with multi-factor sign-in. Which models a person may call can be controlled individually.
Invocation logging is switched on, the recording of the content is switched off. What is documented is who used which model when and to what extent, not what was written in the process.
Encryption runs on keys in your account, not on the provider’s default. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest.
Every workstation gets a finished configuration file. Nobody has to open a terminal or install anything that goes beyond a double click.
The handover includes an acceptance report with ten checks that evidences each of these points individually. The setup counts as delivered only once all ten have passed. You can run the report again at any time, including after changes to your account.
For every lawyer it can be evidenced when which models were called and to what extent. The content of the requests deliberately does not appear in the logs, otherwise the logging itself would become the problem. What remains is enough for three purposes: evidence that no processing took place outside the EU, the allocation of costs to matters or to individual lawyers, and the basis for a separate line item on the client invoice.
On top of that comes the documentation of the configuration itself: a handover document with the state of every setting and a building block for your record of technical and organisational measures.
Every point here comes up in the conversation anyway, usually from the person who advises on IT security law themselves. It is better to read it beforehand.
Stored data sits in Frankfurt. The model call itself can take place in another European region, because not every model is operated in Frankfurt. It does not leave the EU. For the assessment under professional conduct rules the difference can count all the same, which is why it stands here and not in the small print.
AWS is a US company and remains one. In practice the question is defused by the fact that the content is not stored anywhere: access would only be possible at the moment of processing. Anyone who wants to escape the question entirely will not get past their own hardware on their own premises. Providers that advertise a European seat mostly run their models on the infrastructure of American corporations as well.
AWS does not release the newest models to new accounts straight away, but according to utilisation and consumption. A capable model is always ready; the very latest one may only follow a few weeks later. Before you commission us, we say what is actually enabled in your region.
Whatever the model provider makes available through its own servers, such as web search or the marketplace for extensions, does not run in this setup. Both can be rebuilt, but that is a separate module with its own effort.
And the most important point: the assessment under professional conduct rules in the individual case stays with you. We set up an environment, document it and make it auditable. Whether your firm wants to use it in its particular matter structure is your decision.
In the initial call we show a client setup in live operation, anonymised and without client data: the account and permission structure, the blocked path to the outside, the logs. On request we send the confidentiality undertaking in advance for review.
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