Self-hosting & data sovereignty
Self-hosting legal AI: what it actually means
"Self-hosted" gets used loosely. Here's the concrete version: what runs where, and what your firm actually controls.
7 min read
Self-hosting means the platform runs in infrastructure your firm controls — your private cloud or your own servers — rather than on a vendor's multi-tenant cloud. The application, the AI runtime, the email stack, identity, the database, and monitoring run as one coordinated container-based stack.
What you control: where the data lives, which models run, who has access, and your own domains for email. What you don't give up: the ability to turn the AI off, to audit every decision, and to keep privileged data inside your perimeter.
It's a real, supported deployment option — not a marketing asterisk. It is also more work to operate than signing up for a cloud login, which is the honest trade: sovereignty in exchange for owning the infrastructure.
See how this works in EdgeLex.