What Secure A.I. Really Means in Legal Tech: Planning for 2026
A.I. is now part of daily operations in most law firms. As of 2025, 80% of legal professionals report using A.I. tools in their practice. This is a significant increase from just 22% the year prior. (Embroker, 2025) This dramatic growth has reshaped how law firms approach translation, document review, case analysis, and operations.
However, while the appetite for A.I. is growing, legal professionals are approaching adoption with caution. A 2025 Thomson Reuters survey found that while 72% of legal professionals are under pressure to adopt technology to reduce costs, 61% identified data privacy and ethical risk as their top concern (Thomson Reuters, 2025).
With regulatory scrutiny increasing and clients demanding assurance, legal professionals can no longer afford to treat “secure AI” as a vague ideal. It must be built into the foundation of every system they adopt.
The financial and reputational consequences of insufficient A.I. security are intensifying. According to IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report, the average global cost of a data breach is now $4.45 million. For law firms in North America, that figure rises sharply, averaging more than $10 million per breach due to litigation delays, lost clients, regulatory penalties, and billable hour loss (IBM, 2025).
Law firms handle highly sensitive information, including confidential client records, evidence materials, proprietary contracts, and personally identifiable information (PII). Any A.I. solution used to process such content must be built on an infrastructure that enforces the highest security standards at every layer.
Class actions have already been filed in Canada and the United States against firms and legal technology providers who failed to establish safeguards for how legal data is used by AI. These lawsuits reflect a shift in accountability: buyers, regulators, and courts are no longer overlooking security assumptions. (Torys, 2025)
Download our Legal A.I. Security Playbook
Secure A.I. for legal must go far beyond surface-level features. It must deliver enforceable, auditable protections across every layer of the platform.
These pillars represent the non-negotiable standards any A.I. platform must meet when handling sensitive, privileged, or regulated legal data.
SOC 2 Type II has become a cornerstone certification for evaluating the reliability and safety of technology providers in regulated industries. Unlike SOC 2 Type I, which assesses the design of security controls at a single point in time, Type II evaluates how well those controls perform over an extended review period, typically six to twelve months, through an independent audit.
This certification verifies that a vendor’s security framework includes consistent monitoring, access control, incident response readiness, and system availability safeguards. Alexa Translations maintains SOC 2 Type II certification across its infrastructure, covering access management, data integrity, and infrastructure resilience.
Legal teams should always confirm the certification is current, review its scope, and ensure it includes all systems that touch client data, from AI engines to administrative portals and storage systems.
Legal A.I. systems must strictly limit who can access and interact with sensitive data. Platforms should allow administrators to configure permissions so that only authorized users can upload, process, or download legal documents.
This includes:
These controls help minimize human error and ensure legal content is only accessible to those who require it, aligning with the confidentiality expectations of regulated industries.
For legal A.I. to meet professional confidentiality standards, end-to-end encryption must be embedded across all workflows. This includes securing client documents during upload, processing within the platform, and final delivery.
Alexa Translations A.I. applies full encryption policies across its infrastructure. Files in transit are protected through TLS protocols, while data at rest is secured using AES-256 encryption. These standards are consistent with security best practices for handling privileged and regulated information.Importantly, all personally identifiable information (PII) is processed solely within Alexa Translations' proprietary systems. This design reduces the risk of data interception or unauthorized reuse during any part of the process.
Encryption alone does not eliminate risk, but without it, data is immediately vulnerable. Firms evaluating legal AI should confirm that encryption is enforced throughout, not just for transfer, but also during internal handling and post-processing.
Many A.I. platforms operate on multi-tenant systems where client data may be processed together. At Alexa Translations, we implement logical separation: each client's data is indexed and managed so that access and processing are controlled per client.
While data may share memory or infrastructure resources, administrative privileges and access controls ensure that each client's content is only accessible to authorized users.
This approach supports auditability and helps legal teams confirm that their information is handled securely, even in shared environments.
Download our Legal A.I. Security Playbook
Legal A.I. is transforming operations, enabling faster document reviews, contract analysis, and multilingual content processing. But for legal professionals, the quality of outcomes is only as strong as the security and accuracy of the platform behind them.
When legal content is passed through public or opaque infrastructure, firms risk:
Alexa Translations A.I. addresses these concerns through secure encryption and PII-safe workflows, by ensuring that sensitive personal data is processed only on our locally hosted model.
To improve relevance and reliability, Alexa Translations A.I. also incorporates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), an advanced technique that combines generative language models with access to pre-approved legal databases. This means the system can deliver contextually accurate outputs grounded in legal terminology, reducing hallucinations and aligning with firm-specific standards.
With accuracy and confidentiality both in focus, Alexa Translations A.I. enables firms to safely unlock the benefits of generative A.I. while maintaining the control needed to meet client expectations and regulatory demands.
Firms adopting artificial intelligence need to move beyond feature comparisons. Secure A.I. is not about what a platform can do, but how it handles client data, maintains integrity, and meets modern legal obligations.
Here’s what legal teams should look for:
Each element contributes to a system that isn’t just functional, but defensible, able to stand up to client scrutiny, regulatory review, and industry best practice.
Legal technology buyers face more choice, higher client expectations, and more regulatory complexity than ever. Secure A.I. should be measurable, documented, and continually reviewed. The future of legal work in a world of generative A.I. depends on these controls, not on blind trust.
Looking for an actionable evaluation tool? Download Alexa Translations A.I.’s 2026 Legal A.I. Security Guide, a clear framework for buyers, IT, compliance and risk leaders to vet translation, document processing and automation platforms both today and as the market evolves.
It validates that a vendor’s controls are active and effective over time, not just designed well on paper.
It operates within controlled proprietary systems and avoids sending PII to third-party LLMs. It also integrates retrieval-augmented generation for higher accuracy.
