Lawyers want the same thing everyone else wants from AI: ask a question, get a useful answer, move faster.
The difference is that legal documents often come with privilege, confidentiality, protective orders, client expectations, and professional responsibility duties. Uploading a contract set, deposition transcript, pleading file, or discovery bundle into a generic cloud chatbot is not a neutral implementation detail. A vendor sits in the data path.
That is the design problem behind DocuChat: an open-source, local-first document chat app for attorneys.
The core idea is simple:
Put the AI next to the documents, not the documents next to the AI vendor.
