Why I built a "one door out" for law firms instead of another DLP tool
Before this, I built classified redaction systems for Canadian intelligence, the kind of environment where data moves between jurisdictions constantly and one mistake isn't a fine, it's a real problem. Every transfer had to be checked, reasoned about, and logged, not because anyone assumed bad intent, but because "trust me" isn't a control.
When I started talking to law firms, I kept hearing the same shape of problem. They share just as much sensitive material (litigation, expert witnesses, discovery) and they're bound by real regulation, but nobody had built tooling for it. Most existing tools either block and hold everything or don't watch at all. Now AI adds a door nobody's watching either.
DataGuard brings that same discipline to something most firms haven't built tooling for: sharing. It's a pre-flight compliance and privacy check on everything leaving the firm, whatever tool it's going out through. Litigation, discovery, expert witness, AI, all of it gets checked against your firm's policy before it goes. Sensitive material gets flagged for redaction, you approve what leaves, and it's logged with a record of what happened and why.
Launching tomorrow. Curious for this crowd: if you handle regulated or sensitive data, are you actually watching what leaves through every channel, or mostly trusting people to follow policy? Where's that breaking down for you?
Replies
The big thing for me is that people can have good intentions and still share the wrong information. Especially when they’re busy and moving between email, file sharing, cloud storage, and AI tools all day. You can’t expect a written policy to catch those mistakes. Giving people a chance to catch them before they hit send makes a lot of sense. Protecting a file is one thing, but protecting the data inside it is a killer idea.
@rahul_bhatia2 i completely agree, negligence is too common to blame them on. Employees already have enough to deal with and another slow down is not helping them. Additionally with their ai tooling because it ultimately allows them to do their job better. It's hard to actually restrict AI so giving the right tools to provide proper protection is the organizations duty
Where there is smoke, there must be fire. If the same genre of problem exists in intelligence and in legal, regulated industries in general will find this sort of tooling critically valuable.