Every matter, from intake to close, in one controlled workspace.
Owners, approval gates, evidentiary obligations. Bernio models the matter rather than the conversation — and every action lands in a record you can defend.
What stays true no matter which model runs.
Matter isolation
Each matter runs in its own environment, enforced beneath the application — before any model call.
Named accountability
Every gate records who approved what, on which version. Delegating to an agent is itself an approval.
Evidentiary record
Append-only and signed. Where an erasure obligation applies the entry is cryptographically severed, not rewritten. Held on your hardware in on-premise deployments; exportable in full from the hosted tier. Evidence, not telemetry.
Local by default
Which models may see a matter is set by policy, per firm and per task; material sent to an external model is de-identified first and every routing decision is recorded. In your own infrastructure and on Bernio Pro, that policy can exclude external models entirely.
Firm-wide control
The partner’s view: every matter, every gate, every exposure.
Escalations that need a partner are separated from the noise that does not — deadlines slipping, budgets over cap, conflicts pending at intake. It is what lets a managing partner supervise a practice they are not personally running.
- Escalations ranked, not just displayed
- Agent capacity shown beside human capacity
- Inference cost tracked against budget
Time and value
What the work cost, and what it earned.
Time is captured at the task as the work happens, and narratives are drafted from the audit log rather than reconstructed at month end. The record that makes the matter defensible is the record that makes it billable.
- Logged per task, not at end of day
- Narratives written from what actually happened
- Human and agent leverage reported apart
Approval gates
Nothing reaches a client without a name against it.
AI-drafted work is held pending four-eyes review. The gate is a state the matter is in, not a habit the team is asked to maintain under deadline.
Consistency checks
Contradictions surface before a person spends time on them.
Gaps and conflicts across the file are flagged as the work is drafted, with the documents behind each one.
One record
The file that defends the matter is the file that bills it.
Approvals, versions and billing narratives all resolve to the same append-only log.
A clause is the usual answer. Ours is a clause and an architecture.
On every tier. The matter boundary, the approval gate and the signed record are enforced in the runtime — hosted, in your own infrastructure, or on Bernio Pro.
- ABA Model Rules 5.1 & 5.3US
Managerial lawyers must make reasonable efforts to ensure subordinate and nonlawyer assistance is compatible with professional obligations.
Every AI output stops at a gate owned by a named practitioner, and the approval is written to the record.
- ABA Formal Opinion 512US
Lawyers using generative AI must protect client confidentiality and obtain informed consent before disclosing confidential information to a tool.
Where inference runs in your own infrastructure, the third-party disclosure does not occur. On the hosted tier the disclosure is to Bernio under the processing terms, and consent is assessed on that basis. Either way, whether your engagement terms call for a client conversation remains your judgement — Opinion 512 covers competence and supervision too, not only disclosure.
- GDPR Art. 32EU
Technical measures must be appropriate to the risk, and the controller must be able to demonstrate them.
Per-matter isolation, signed append-only logging and on-premise processing are demonstrable rather than contractual.
- § 203 StGB (Germany)EU
Disclosure of a professional secret by a lawyer is a criminal offence; involving external providers requires strict safeguards.
When the model runs on the firm’s own hardware, the disclosure the provision is concerned with does not occur.
See it against one of your own matters.
We run the demo on a matter type you actually handle, and show the audit record it produces.
Development status
Bernio is in active development with design partners — firms running real matters through the platform and shaping what is built next — and the first commercial contracts are being signed on founding terms. The capabilities described on this page are built and can be demonstrated on a matter type your team handles. Bernio Pro — the on-premise appliance — is an engineering prototype and is not yet commercially available, so any capability on this site that depends on it is marked as such. Descriptions of the product are not warranties; the binding terms for any deployment are those set out in the applicable written agreement.