Casebound refuses to release an AI draft until a licensed attorney signs it out against an approved precedent. The refusal, the sign-out, and the edit are all written to an append-only record you can export. When someone asks who directed the AI, that record is the answer.
In February a federal court held that a defendant's AI-generated legal work was protected by neither attorney–client privilege nor work product. The work-product claim failed for a specific reason: the material was prepared on his own volition, not at the direction of counsel.
Zero-retention terms with a model vendor answer the confidentiality half of that. They do not answer the other half. Attorney direction is not a setting you enable — it is something that either happened and was recorded, or did not.
United States v. Heppner, S.D.N.Y. (Rakoff, J.), Feb. 2026 · this is a description of a published decision, not legal advice
Every legal AI product on the market generates work.
None of them sign it.
Harvey, Legora, Clio, Claude for Legal — all of them put a draft in front of you. What happens next is a habit, and a habit is not evidence. Casebound makes the sign-out a precondition of release, which is the only way it reliably ends up in a record.
Other systems review your matters and tell you what looks wrong. Casebound refuses the write. There is no override flag, no "proceed anyway," and no prompt asking the model to behave — the constraint lives in the database, and the test suite proves it holds.
A matter cannot be created while a conflict check is outstanding or unresolved. Not shouldn't — cannot.
An AI draft cannot be finalized to a client without a recorded attorney disposition against an approved precedent. Approval is a database state, set by a bar-numbered human.
A matter cannot be closed without a closing letter on file.
Document versions and audit entries are append-only. There is no edit path and no delete path, including for the firm.
You stay the lawyer. The system holds the door.
Every refusal and every sign-out writes a row. Export any document's chain as a standalone record: who directed it, what drafted it, which approved precedent it ran against, what the attorney changed before releasing it, and a hash chain that makes the sequence tamper-evident.
A competitor can show you a report about your matters. This is a record of who was accountable for one, written at the moment it happened.
Not a reminder to run the check. The matter will not open until it clears.
Matters, drafting, billing and the compliance calendar share one data model, so nothing has to be re-keyed and nothing drifts between systems.
The discipline you already practice stops depending on your memory on a bad week. It becomes a constraint the database enforces on you.
Lexwright is the drafting engine. It works from precedents your firm wrote and an attorney approved — not from a model's impression of what an engagement letter looks like. Every draft carries its provenance: the precedent, the model and version, the parameters, the timestamp.
It has no path to a client. Release is a separate act, performed by a person with a bar number, and it is the act the binding log exists to record.
Casebound runs a working California practice. Matters open in it, drafts generate in it, invoices go out of it. When we say a gate refuses, we mean it has refused us — mid-matter, under a deadline, when it would have been easier if it hadn't. The first thing any evaluation should ask for is the log from a matter that actually ran.
Every feature has billed a real matter before it ships.
It is evidence, not a guarantee, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. Privilege and work-product turn on facts — whether an attorney directed the work, in anticipation of litigation, and treated it as the firm's. A contemporaneous record of attorney direction is the difference between producing that evidence and reconstructing it from memory two years later in a discovery fight. We can show you the record. We cannot promise you a ruling.
Likely by something sold on a demo and a roadmap. The check here is specific: ask for a gate to be demonstrated refusing something, and ask for the exported log of a matter that ran end to end. Both exist or they don't, and you can tell in ten minutes.
The model provider under zero-retention terms, and nowhere else. No training on your matters. The deployment model, the endpoint, and what leaves your tenant are all things we will put in writing before you sign anything.
Casebound records trust obligations as facts against the matter. It does not do trust accounting and does not reconcile — your bank is the source of truth and your IOLTA stays where it is. Invoicing settles to the operating account only. That boundary is deliberate and we will not blur it.
Practice management that added AI puts the record beside the work. Here the record is a precondition of the work leaving — remove it and drafts stop releasing. That is a different architecture, and it is the reason the log is complete rather than mostly complete.
Practice law. The rest is handled.
Casebound is taking a small number of firms this year, starting with practices where a privilege record would matter.
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