How to Read a Legal AI Vendor's Sub-Processor List
What a sub-processor list actually discloses, and the five things to check before you approve an AI vendor for privileged documents.
Read the article →Private AI for law firms
Answers grounded in your own files — every claim cited to a page.
Vorticel is a private AI research assistant for law firms — ask questions across your own documents and get answers grounded in your files, with citations to the exact source passage.
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- Cited to the document and page
- Refuses instead of guessing
- Never trains on your data
An illustrative example generated from a sample document — not a live query. Vorticel refuses rather than guesses; every answer is grounded in your firm’s own files.
Built for the documents a practice actually runs on
What is Vorticel?
Vorticel is a private, multi-tenant AI research assistant for law firms. Your firm uploads its own retainer agreements, contracts, and discovery; you ask questions in plain English; Vorticel answers only from those documents and cites the exact document and page for every claim — and says so plainly when the answer isn’t there.
How it works
Three steps from upload to a cited answer.
No prompt engineering, no training, no setup project. Upload, ask, check the citation.
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1
Upload your firm’s documents
PDF, Word, or plain text. Each file is encrypted per firm before it touches disk, then extracted and indexed automatically.
Retainer_Smith.pdfIndexing -
2
Ask in plain English
“What’s the notice period for termination without cause?” Vorticel searches only your firm’s files — never the open internet.
What’s the notice period for termination without cause? -
3
Get an answer you can check
Every claim carries a citation to the document and page. Click it, open the passage, verify it yourself.
60 days’ written noticeEmployment_Agreement.pdf, p. 7
Grounded answers
Every answer is built only from what your firm actually filed.
General-purpose chat tools answer from the whole internet and can’t tell you where a sentence came from. Vorticel retrieves the relevant passages from your own documents and drafts the answer from those passages alone.
- Citations name the document and the page — not “according to sources”
- Retrieval is scoped to your firm’s own library on every query
- No outside knowledge is mixed into the answer
Answer · illustrative example
The agreement requires 60 days’ written notice for termination without cause, served to the address of record.
Employment_Agreement.pdf, p. 7Severance is two weeks of base salary per completed year, capped at twelve weeks.
Employment_Agreement.pdf, p. 9Honest refusal
When the answer isn’t in your documents, Vorticel says so.
A confident guess is worse than no answer in legal work. If the retrieved passages don’t support an answer, Vorticel tells you it couldn’t find it — it never fills the gap with outside knowledge.
- “I couldn’t find this in your documents” instead of a fabricated holding
- Verified by an automated check before every release
- Not a lawyer, not legal advice — a document-search tool that shows its work
Question · illustrative example
What did the court rule in Nguyen v. Barrett?
I couldn’t find this in your documents. None of the uploaded files mention this case. Try uploading the opinion or a brief that cites it.
Tenant isolation
One firm’s files can never surface in another firm’s answers.
Every document, passage, question, and answer is tagged with your firm’s account boundary the instant it is created, and every lookup is filtered to that boundary before anything is returned. There is no shared index across firms.
- Enforced at the data layer, not just in the interface
- Encrypted at rest per firm with libsodium
- Your original files never leave encrypted storage
How isolation works
Your firm
Another firm
Cross-firm retrieval test0 rows, every release
Security & confidentiality
Written for your IT and compliance reviewer, not for a brochure.
Exactly who touches what, and why each step is necessary — nothing skipped, nothing hidden.
Encrypted at rest, per firm
Files are encrypted with libsodium before they are written to disk and stay encrypted until your firm requests them back.
No training on your data
Your documents, questions, and answers are never used to train any model — ours or any vendor’s.
Minimum data to each vendor
Text goes to Voyage AI to be embedded; only the passages retrieved for one question go to Anthropic. The full sub-processor list is public.
Audit trail & export
Sign-ins, uploads, deletions, and team changes are logged per firm. Download your originals any time — no lock-in.
Pricing
Simple, per-firm pricing. Start free.
Every plan begins with a 14-day free trial — no card required. Upgrade when your firm is ready.
Solo
For a single practitioner working alone.
$49/mo
- 1 seat
- Up to 200 documents
- 300 questions / month
- Web app access
Most popular
Firm
For a small firm sharing documents and matters.
$199/mo
- 5 seats
- Up to 1,000 documents
- 1,500 questions / month
- API access & sync agent
Enterprise
For larger firms with API and sync-agent needs.
$599/mo
- 15 seats
- Up to 5,000 documents
- 6,000 questions / month
- API access & sync agent
Questions firms ask first
Straight answers before you upload a single file.
How does Vorticel keep one firm's files separate from another's?
Every firm on Vorticel gets its own tenant boundary. Under the hood, every document, every extracted passage, and every question and answer is tagged with your firm's account and every database lookup is filtered to that tag before anything is returned. There is no shared search index across firms, and no query path exists that can return another firm's documents — the boundary is enforced at the data layer, not just in the interface.
Is my firm's data used to train AI?
No. Vorticel does not use your documents, questions, or answers to train any model. To make search work, document text is sent to Voyage AI (a MongoDB company) to be embedded, and only the passages retrieved for a given question are sent to Anthropic to draft the answer; the original files never leave encrypted storage. See our Security page for the full sub-processor list.
Does Vorticel give legal advice?
No — Vorticel is a document-search tool, not a lawyer. It finds and cites what your own documents say; it does not offer legal opinions, recommendations, or advice, and nothing it returns should be treated as legal advice. When your documents don't contain an answer, Vorticel says so rather than guessing.
From the blog
Practical notes on AI, confidentiality, and document work in law firms.
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Read the article →How to Prep for a Deposition With AI Document Search
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Read the article →Try it on your own documents this week.
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