Client files for solo attorneys: local AI, no cloud

Why would you refuse the cloud for this work?

SealedBrief is a local-first desktop workspace for question-and-answer over your own confidential documents. Your documents and your questions stay on your own machine.

Beyond PDFs and Word files, SealedBrief indexes spreadsheets, slide decks, email files, and OpenDocument files, extracting their text on your own machine. Point SealedBrief at a folder and it keeps the index current on its own, re-indexing a file when you add or edit it. Workspaces can be labelled as matters, patients, cases, or projects, matching how lawyers, clinicians, and researchers already organise their work. Answers are grounded in passages retrieved from your own documents and show the source paragraphs alongside the response.

Is the inference local, or is it an API call?

The language model, the embedding model, and the reranking model all run on your own hardware — none of the AI pipeline reaches a server.

Retrieval blends meaning-based vector search with exact keyword search, so a specific case number, statute cite, or identifier is found even when a purely semantic match would miss it. When a PDF page holds little or no selectable text, SealedBrief runs on-device OCR on it automatically, so scanned pages become searchable alongside born-digital ones. With a matter or patient workspace active, retrieval is limited to that workspace’s own folders, so a question won’t pull passages from files outside it. SealedBrief can write a short summary under a document the first time you open it, generated on your own machine and only for the files you actually look at.

How would you falsify the offline claim?

With an outbound-connection firewall running, the process that reads your documents shows no connection attempts, because it makes none. Because the document engine is a separate process, a per-process network monitor can attribute each connection to the right part of the app, and the document engine shows no external connections during indexing and Q&A.

After the first launch the document work runs offline, because the models ship inside the app and nothing is fetched at runtime. SealedBrief’s shipped AppImage bundles its models in the download, so the Compute engine’s opt-in first-run model-download hatch is never needed on a normal install and its network-egress guard stays active. The no-network rule is enforced at runtime for the whole life of the document engine, so even a future dependency that tried to phone home would hit a hard error instead of slipping through. SealedBrief’s no-egress checks cover both TCP and UDP traffic, so newer transports such as QUIC cannot slip past unobserved.

Why the update check is opt-in

The Presentation Plane’s network traffic does not grow when your document volume grows, which rules out bulk exfiltration. The Presentation Plane makes two kinds of network call: a licence check and an opt-in update check.

The licence requests are a small, fixed-shape JSON whose exact fields SealedBrief publishes, so their size and content do not vary with your document activity. The device identifier the licence check sends is a hashed 32-character fingerprint of stable machine details, not your hardware serial numbers or hostname in the clear. A redaction filter at the crash-reporting boundary strips filesystem paths, email addresses, and key-shaped tokens before anything leaves the process. SealedBrief publishes which hosts its interface can contact, and invites you to report anything else your own packet capture shows as a bug.

Why the download is about 15 GB

CPU-only operation works but is meaningfully slower than running on a GPU or on Apple Silicon.

SealedBrief runs well on a 12 GB-or-larger NVIDIA GPU, with roughly 16 GB of RAM and about 15 GB of free disk. The download is about 15 GB as a one-time download, because the models ship inside the application. SealedBrief matches its bundled language model to your hardware on its own — the larger Qwen3-14B on GPUs with more memory, the 8B model on smaller ones — with nothing to configure. SealedBrief is not certified evidence-management software for any jurisdiction’s chain-of-custody rules.

How do you start, offline, today?

A SealedBrief licence is a one-time purchase for a 3-year term, and it does not auto-renew. Every purchase is backed by a 30-day refund, separate from the free trial.

Starting the free trial makes no network call. The licence is an Ed25519-signed file that is verified offline, so activation keeps working for the rest of your term even without the vendor. The Personal tier is licensed for your own personal, non-commercial use; paid client work requires the Professional tier’s commercial-use grant. The Professional tier is a 3-year term licence priced at $499, with support in years two and three billed separately.

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This article was drafted with AI assistance.