A plain-English walkthrough of what’s actually happening.

We get this question a lot, and it deserves a real answer — not the marketing kind. Here is what LawLlama actually does, in language a busy managing partner can read in five minutes.

I. Where it lives

LawLlama is software you install on a single computer in your office. Not a cloud login. Not a website you go to. A computer — an existing workstation, or a spare one your firm already owns — that sits in your office the same way your file server does, and runs LawLlama for everyone in the firm to use from their browser.

That choice is deliberate, and it’s the most important thing on this page. Every other AI legal product on the market sends your client files to a data centre run by someone else, somewhere else, to be processed and stored. We don’t. Nothing leaves your building. If you unplugged the building’s internet tomorrow, LawLlama would keep working — because everything it needs is already inside.

II. How research works

You type a legal question the way you’d ask it of a senior associate. Three things happen, on your computer, in about the time it takes you to sip a coffee:

It searches Alberta case law. LawLlama ships with a searchable library of Alberta and federal case law from the last thirty years. When you ask a question, it finds the cases and paragraphs most likely to be on point — the same way a senior associate would.

It writes you an answer. It reads the relevant material and drafts a direct answer in plain English. The answer reads like a memo to a partner, not a search result.

It checks every citation before showing you anything. This is the part most legal AI gets wrong. You’ve probably read the stories about lawyers who got sanctioned because their AI invented case names. LawLlama verifies every case it cites against the actual source, and if a citation doesn’t support what the answer claims, it’s flagged. If LawLlama can’t find authority for a statement, the answer says so plainly — instead of making something up.

III. How document review works

Drag a PDF, Word document, or an entire folder onto LawLlama. It reads everything — including scanned pages, deeds, and briefs — and answers questions against the document in front of you. Every answer is accompanied by the specific page and paragraph it came from, so you can verify in seconds.

Nothing is uploaded to anyone. The document stays on your computer; the notes LawLlama keeps about it stay in the same folder.

IV. How it works with the software you already use

LawLlama is built to live inside the tools your firm already runs every day, not as another app you have to remember to open. Two integrations matter most for a small firm: Microsoft Office and Clio.

Microsoft Office (Word, Outlook, Excel)

LawLlama is a native add-in for Microsoft Office. Once installed, it shows up as a sidebar inside Word, Outlook, and Excel — the same way the Adobe Acrobat or Grammarly add-ins do. You don’t open a separate app; you just keep working in Word and LawLlama is right there when you need it.

In Word, ask it to research a clause, draft a paragraph, or summarize the document you’re reviewing. In Outlook, ask it to summarize a long thread before you reply, or pull a relevant case into your draft. In Excel, ask it to interpret a column of numbers from an actuarial table. Everything happens inside the document you’re already in.

Clio (matter context)

If your firm runs on Clio, LawLlama can read — with your permission and read-only by default — the matter you’re currently working on: client name, opposing parties, file type. That means when you open LawLlama from inside a matter, it already knows the context. You don’t have to paste anything.

It does not write back to Clio unless you explicitly ask it to. And if you don’t use Clio, LawLlama works exactly the same way — you just type the matter context in once, the way you would on a yellow pad.

V. How updates work

LawLlama gets better over time. When a new version is ready, you see a small notification inside the app. Installing it is one click, on your schedule — never in the middle of court prep.

New Alberta decisions are folded into the searchable library every few weeks, and you don’t need to do anything for that to happen. The update arrives the same way the version updates do.

VI. What it runs on

A standard Windows 10 or Windows 11 computer with 16 GB of memory and 50 GB of free disk space. Most firms already have a workstation that meets this easily. For sole practitioners or two-lawyer firms, your existing desktop will do the job. For firms over ten lawyers, a small dedicated server is a cleaner fit — we’ll help you spec it.

If you’d rather not pick the hardware yourself, we can recommend a complete machine for under $2,000 that will run LawLlama for as long as you need it.

VII. What it isn’t

We want to be clear about scope, because most legal-tech is sold by promising everything. LawLlama is not a practice-management system — it does not replace Clio, PCLaw, or Soluno. It is not a document-management system — it reads your documents but doesn’t store your firm’s archive. It is not a contract lifecycle tool — no templates, no e-signatures, no workflow approvals. It is not a chatbot for your clients.

It is a research associate and a reading assistant. That is the entire scope, on purpose. We would rather build the two things that take half your week and build them well than build twenty things badly.