AI for solicitors: search matter documents and check every answer

Law firms spend a large share of their time finding things in documents: the clause in the third amendment, the notice provision in a supplier agreement, the letter where a client first raised a concern. DOCNUS lets a team upload matter documents and ask questions in plain English. Each answer cites the file and page, and clicking the citation opens the source at that page. This page covers how firms use it, what the SRA has said about AI, and honest answers to the questions your firm should ask any AI vendor, including us.

Questions you can ask across a matter

Upload the contracts, correspondence and reports for a matter, then ask questions like these:

• "Which of these agreements contain a change-of-control clause, and what triggers it?"
• "Is liability uncapped anywhere? Show me the limitation of liability clauses."
• "What is the governing law and jurisdiction in each contract?"
• "What notice period applies to termination in the distribution agreement?"
• "When does the lease renew, and by when do we need to serve notice?"

Every answer cites the document and page it relied on. The citation is the point: it turns the answer into a pointer you can verify in seconds, rather than a summary you have to take on trust. A fee earner still reads the clause, but spends less time looking for it.

Search combines meaning and keywords, so a question about "change of control" can also surface a clause that talks about "a transfer of the majority of the shares" without using that phrase. Scanned documents are read with OCR, including tables. See AI document search for how retrieval works.

Beyond search

• Obligations. On Professional and above, DOCNUS reads renewals, notice periods, termination rights and other obligations from contracts, and you can export them to CSV.
• Knowledge graph. Parties, people, agreements and the relationships between them (party to, signed, subsidiary of, governed by and others) are extracted, so you can open a profile for a counterparty and see every document that mentions it.
• Privacy assessment. On Professional and Enterprise, privacy assessment flags documents that hold personal data, including special category data, which helps with data rooms and subject access requests.

What the SRA says about AI

Solicitors' duty of confidentiality applies to AI tools as much as to anything else. Paragraph 6.3 of the SRA Code of Conduct for Solicitors says: "You keep the affairs of current and former clients confidential unless disclosure is required or permitted by law or the client consents."

The SRA's Risk Outlook on artificial intelligence (November 2023) highlights the need to protect confidentiality and privilege, and the risk of putting client details into public tools. It warns: "Be careful when transferring data to a cloud based system if you are not certain in which jurisdiction the data will be held." It also makes clear that responsibility cannot be handed over to IT staff or vendors.

In August 2026 the SRA issued a warning notice on the misuse of AI. It says putting client documents into an open AI tool can place them in the public domain, and that AI tools need contractual and technical safeguards, with data kept in a secure environment and not used to train models unless explicitly authorised. Solicitors remain accountable for the outcome.

The practical message is that your firm needs to understand, in specific terms, where a tool processes data and under what terms. So here are our answers.

Questions to ask any AI vendor, and our answers

We would rather you see these gaps now than find them in due diligence. For some firms, US processing or the lack of SSO will rule DOCNUS out, and that is a reasonable decision. If your firm already runs on Microsoft 365 and wants an assistant across email, meetings and files, our comparison with Microsoft Copilot sets out when Copilot is the better fit. More detail is on our security page.

A sensible way to start

1. Read the privacy policy and security page with your risk or compliance lead, and decide whether the processing locations and controls fit your policies and client terms.
2. Start on the Free plan with non-confidential material, such as precedents or published documents, to see whether cited answers save your team time. Free allows 2 users, 5 documents and 30 searches a month.
3. Check your client terms. Some engagement letters restrict where client data can be processed. If in doubt, ask the client.
4. Upgrade only if it fits. Professional ($149 a month, ex. tax) covers 15 users, 500 documents and 1,000 searches a month, plus obligations and privacy assessment. Enterprise ($349) covers unlimited users and 2,000 documents. Pricing is per team, not per user. See pricing.
5. Keep a human in the loop. Treat every answer as a lead to the source, and read the cited page before relying on it.

Limits worth knowing

• Only PDF, Word and plain text files are supported. Email, spreadsheets and other formats are not.
• There is no integration with document management systems, SharePoint or email. Documents are uploaded directly.
• There is no public API.
• DOCNUS does not give legal advice, and its answers are not a substitute for a solicitor's review.

If you have questions that this page does not answer, get in touch.