Start with a written scope
Most firms adopt legal AI by accident: one associate pastes a draft into a public chatbot. The fix is not prohibition, it is a one-page written scope that says which tasks are allowed and which are not.
Reasonable uses
Rewriting text you authored. Structuring an outline from your own notes. Translating correspondence for a foreign client. Summarising a document you have already read. In each case you can detect an error, which is the only real safeguard.
Uses to exclude
Case-law research without checking the primary source: fabricated citations remain common. Uploading privileged material to a consumer tool with no processing agreement. Producing reasoning you could not defend yourself before the court.
What a dedicated tool changes
The difference is not drafting quality, it is the frame around it: European hosting, per-firm isolation, a data processing agreement, and no reuse of your work to train a model. That frame is what makes the use compatible with professional secrecy.
A four-point control routine
Publish the list of permitted tasks. Forbid pasting identifying material into any tool without a signed agreement. Verify every citation at source. Record the human review in the file.
Our position
Qadilex places drafting assistance inside the matter file, under the same isolation rules as the documents themselves. Those functions are in development, and we describe them as assistance to the lawyer, never as a substitute.
Tasks where assistance pays off
Summarising a long exhibit, rephrasing a paragraph, drafting a first outline, translating an exchange: in each case the lawyer can spot an error immediately. The time saved is real because verification is fast.
Tasks that expose the firm
Citations, deadlines, amounts, applicable provisions: a language model can produce these fluently and incorrectly. Anything that will appear in a filing must be checked against the source, one item at a time.
Confidentiality questions to ask first
Are submitted contents retained? Are they used for training? Where are they hosted? Without written answers, assume that no case document belongs in the tool — light anonymisation is rarely enough, since a date and a street name can identify a matter.
A four-line firm policy
State what is permitted, with which tool, on which data, and who checks before anything is sent. One page that the whole team knows protects the firm better than a blanket ban nobody follows.