At a small or mid-size firm, someone still has to remember to upload every new engagement letter, filed motion, or signed contract into your AI research tool by hand. Skip a folder for a week and your search results quietly go stale — the document is sitting in your firm's drive, but the AI never saw it. Vorticel is a private, multi-tenant AI research assistant for law firms: it answers questions from your firm's own uploaded documents and cites the exact document and page it drew from. A sync agent removes the "someone has to remember" step by watching a folder and uploading new or changed files on its own.
What Is a Sync Agent?
A sync agent is a small background program installed on a machine with access to your firm's file storage. It watches one or more folders you point it at, and any time a file is added or changed, it uploads that file through the same API your firm would otherwise call by hand.
It does not move, rename, or delete anything in the source folder — it reads and uploads. Your original file storage stays exactly as it was; Vorticel receives a copy to encrypt, extract text from, and index for search. Like any document uploaded to Vorticel, files need to be PDF, DOCX, or TXT — a sync agent doesn't change what file types the platform can read, only how those files get there.
How Does a Sync Agent Connect to Your File Storage?
The sync agent connects using a per-firm API key, generated from your account settings, and it authenticates on every request the same way a custom integration would. There is no separate "sync agent account" with broader access than your firm already has.
Once running, it does two things: an initial pass over the folder you pointed it at, uploading everything already there, and an ongoing watch for anything added or modified afterward. New associates don't need to be trained to remember an upload step — if a document lands in the watched folder, it gets picked up on the next pass.
Does a Sync Agent Change How Paralegals and Associates Use Vorticel?
No — day-to-day, nothing changes for the people asking questions. They still open Vorticel, ask a question, and get a cited answer from whatever documents have been indexed; the sync agent only changes how those documents got there in the first place. If your firm is still working out how a paralegal team should ask questions and read citations day to day, that process is covered separately in how to onboard a paralegal team on AI research software.
Seat planning is a separate question from sync. The sync agent authenticates with an API key tied to your firm's account, not to an individual user seat, so turning it on doesn't require buying extra seats — it just means documents show up without anyone assigned to upload them.
Sync Agent vs. Manual Upload vs. API-Only Ingestion
Firm and Enterprise accounts actually have three ways to get documents into Vorticel, and they suit different situations.
| Method | Ongoing effort | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Manual upload | One click per file, every time | Occasional documents, one-off uploads |
| Custom API integration | One-time build, then maintained by whoever wrote it | Firms with in-house developer time and a specific workflow to wire up |
| Sync agent | One-time install, then none | Firms that want new documents indexed automatically without writing code |
The sync agent is the middle path: you get the automation of a custom integration without having to write or maintain one. Both the sync agent and a custom API integration require a Firm or Enterprise plan — see plan details for what else is included at each tier.
Do You Need an IT Department to Turn One On?
No. The sync agent is a single installer, not a project. You generate an API key, run the installer on a machine that can already see the folder you want watched, and point it at that folder — there is no server to stand up and no ongoing maintenance beyond making sure the machine it runs on stays on.
This is the gap the sync agent is built to close: point it at a folder once, and it keeps your search index current without a recurring task on anyone's calendar. The setup steps, including the exact installer commands, are in the docs.
Setting Up Automated Sync in Five Steps
The process is the same regardless of what file storage your firm uses:
- Confirm your plan. The sync agent and REST API ship on the Firm ($199/month) and Enterprise ($599/month) plans; Solo does not include API access.
- Generate an API key from your account settings.
- Install the sync agent on a machine with access to the folder or drive you want watched.
- Point it at the source folder. It uploads what it finds today, then watches for anything new or changed.
- Confirm the first sync in the app. Uploaded documents appear tagged to your firm and become searchable once ingest finishes.
Is Automatic Syncing as Secure as Manual Upload?
Yes — a document uploaded by the sync agent goes through the identical pipeline as one dragged in by hand. It is tagged with your firm's account before anything else happens to it, and every database lookup is filtered to that tag, so no query path exists that returns another firm's documents. The file is encrypted per-firm (libsodium) before it's written to disk and stays encrypted until your firm requests it back.
To make the document searchable, its extracted text is sent to Voyage AI to be converted into embeddings, and only the specific passages retrieved for a given question are later sent to Anthropic to draft an answer — the original file itself never leaves encrypted storage, whether it arrived by manual upload or by the sync agent. None of it is used to train any model. The full data flow, step by step, is documented on the security page.
What About Migration Effort and Vendor Lock-In?
The honest concern here is usually "what if we want to stop." Turning the sync agent off is a matter of stopping the process or revoking its API key — it does not touch, move, or delete anything in your original file storage, because it never had permission to do any of that in the first place. It only reads and uploads.
If your firm decides automated sync isn't worth the setup, manual upload still works exactly the same way it always has, and nothing about your existing documents changes either way. There is no data format to migrate out of and no separate sync-specific storage to unwind.
A more common worry is scale: what happens if the agent finds a folder with several thousand existing files the first time it runs. It processes what it finds in the order it finds it — there's no need to sort or thin out a folder before pointing the agent at it, though firms with a genuinely large one-time backlog sometimes point it at a smaller subfolder first to confirm behavior before syncing everything.
Start Syncing Documents Automatically
If your firm is on the Firm or Enterprise plan already, generate an API key from your account settings and install the sync agent against one folder to see how it behaves before pointing it at anything larger. If you're not on Vorticel yet, start a 14-day free trial — no card required — and you'll have API access to test as soon as you're on a Firm plan.