Your firm’s own precedent, without leaking one client into another matter.
Templates, memoranda and house-style positions, with retrieval scoped to what the current matter is allowed to see.
What stays true no matter which model runs.
Curated, not scraped
Material enters because somebody put it there. Nothing is harvested from live matters into a firm-wide pool.
Retrieval respects the walls
A document the current team may not see is not retrieved or summarised — it is not a search result at all.
Provenance on every passage
A retrieved passage carries the document, version and author it came from.
No training on client data
Retrieval reads; it does not absorb. Client material never trains or fine-tunes a model.
Where precedent is used
Cited by name, inside the argument.
A drafted issue names the clause and version it drew on, so a practitioner is choosing a precedent rather than accepting a paraphrase of several.
- Sources cited by document and version
- Retrieval events logged against the draft
- Firm positions held with the authority
Where precedent lives
Inside the same matter-scoped register.
House-style documents carry the same identity, versioning and permissions as matter files, which is why a retrieval can be scoped at all.
- Stable IDs and full version history
- Ethical screens applied at retrieval
- Superseded precedent retired, not left to compete
Curation
House style is a state a document is in.
Approved-for-reuse material is marked, tagged by jurisdiction and practice, and attributed to the partner who owns it.
Authorities
The firm’s reading of a case, beside the case.
Where the firm holds a position, it sits with the authority and carries its treatment status.
Decay
A weakened authority flags what depends on it.
When a ruling is distinguished, every precedent that relied on it is surfaced rather than left to be discovered.
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 Rule 1.9(c)US
A lawyer shall not use information relating to a former representation to that client’s disadvantage, or reveal it.
Retrieval is scoped by matter and by ethical screen, so former-client material is not reachable from a matter with no right to it.
- ABA Model Rule 1.6(c)US
A lawyer must make reasonable efforts to prevent inadvertent or unauthorised disclosure of client information.
The knowledge base is curated rather than harvested, and no client material trains a model — so there is no pooled artefact to disclose.
- GDPR Art. 5(1)(b)EU
Data must be collected for specified purposes and not further processed in a way incompatible with them.
Material enters by an explicit act with an owner and a purpose; matter data is not repurposed into a firm-wide corpus.
Start with the precedents you already trust.
We load a practice group’s templates and show what retrieval returns inside a live matter — and what it refuses to return.
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.