AI compliance
SafeIdea is compliance infrastructure for AI in legal practice. With SafeIdea, firms can operationalize their AI compliance requirements across attorneys and staff. Attorneys can use the AI of their choice while the patent-pending Masking Engine keeps confidential information on the attorney's machine.
The masking workflow
Twenty-five seconds, end to end. The document never leaves the attorney's machine. Only the masked version is transmitted. The response is restored locally. A Compliance Receipt is emitted on demand.
Masking Engine
When a document arrives in SafeIdea, the Masking Engine reads it on the attorney's machine. There is no cloud round-trip for detection. The engine scans the document for the categories of content attorneys have a duty to protect: people's names, organizations, addresses, dates, dollar amounts, case numbers, patent numbers, jurisdictions, and the firm-specific identifiers the firm has registered (internal client numbers, matter codes, project codenames). The attorney reviews what the engine proposes to mask, edits or adds entries, and approves before any content is transmitted.
The detection step takes seconds, not minutes. The engine works offline. No telemetry about what was detected leaves the device.
Turn by turn
The masking is not a one-time document-drop event. Every back-and-forth with the cloud AI runs through the same boundary. When the attorney asks a follow-up question, the Masking Engine masks the question on the attorney's machine before it is transmitted. When the AI's answer returns, the engine restores the real names locally before the attorney reads it. The attorney sees a normal conversation with their AI of choice. The cloud AI sees placeholders the entire time.
The Masking Dictionary
SafeIdea's Masking Dictionary stores the entities you or your firm have determined are confidential. It supports masking at three scopes: firm-wide, cross-matter, and matter-level. This way, firms can distribute their compliance approach while giving attorneys the flexibility to add new entities as needed.
Firm-scoped. Built and maintained by the Firm Administrator.
Holds the canonical firmwide entities sourced from CRM: client names and businesses, the firm's partners, frequent opposing counsel, the courts the firm appears in often, standard vendors.
The firm sets the floor; attorneys exercise judgment above it.
Per attorney. The attorney's terminal scope.
When the same entity recurs across the attorney's matters, the attorney can promote it. Select the entry in the dictionary, click promote, and the entity masks consistently across all the attorney's matters from that point forward.
Entries do not propagate to the Firm Masking Dictionary. The scope exists so an attorney can apply matter-aware judgment above the firm's floor without bleeding firmwide.
Per matter. Lives on the attorney's machine.
Created when a matter is opened. The default scope for any entity SafeIdea has masked.
When the matter closes, its dictionary stays put; SafeIdea does not propagate it anywhere automatically.
Firm Masking Dictionary
The Firm Masking Dictionary is the firm's accumulated, canonical record of how it identifies confidential information. A new firm starts with an empty Firm Masking Dictionary and SafeIdea works fine on the attorney scope from day one. As the firm wants more consistency across attorneys, the Firm Administrator builds the firm-wide dictionary.
The Firm Administrator is the person who manages technology or operations at the firm. The role does not require a law license. For a solo practitioner, the attorney is the Firm Administrator. For a firm of 15, it is typically the operations manager, the office manager, or the IT person. The build takes hours, not weeks. Refreshes happen on the firm's cadence: new clients, new opposing counsel, new vendors, new internal codes get added to the next Indexer run.
Evidence
SafeIdea makes "reasonable efforts" under Rule 1.6 operational rather than rhetorical.
Every interaction inside SafeIdea produces an immutable per-turn record: which matter, which documents, which entities masked, which model invoked, when, and by whom. The records are cryptographically chained and tamper-evident. Read-only after creation. They are the substrate Compliance Receipts reference.
Signed, chained, tamper-evident PDFs the attorney emits on demand. A Compliance Receipt documents who used SafeIdea on a matter, when, and what kind of action was taken. It captures principal, timestamp, and action category. It never captures the underlying confidential content. The attorney produces the receipt for a managing partner, ethics counsel, a malpractice carrier, a regulator, a client, or a court.
Matter 016 · Sequoia Drafting v. Birch & Holm
Compliance Receipts are attorney-owned artifacts. The admin console at launch manages seat assignments only; it does not expose per-attorney Compliance Receipts or per-attorney Audited Session Records. The confidentiality boundary holds inside the firm.
Compatible AI
SafeIdea is multi-LLM by design. The compliance layer is agnostic to which AI you choose. Drag and drop masked prompts and documents to whichever provider you already use. Your existing subscription handles the request on your account.
Frontier AI
Legal-specific AI
SafeIdea is compliance infrastructure for AI in legal practice.