Court buildings have poor signal. Flights have none. The desktop app keeps a copy of your workspace on your machine so the day’s work does not stop when the connection does.
What works with no connection
Your cases, clients, tasks and notes are held locally. You can read them, edit them, and create new ones. Changes queue up and are sent when you are back online. There is nothing to remember to do.
What needs a connection
Anything that asks an AI model to think. Drafting, research, summarising, the assistant itself, and voice all require a connection, because the reasoning happens on our servers rather than on your laptop. So do document uploads and anything reading live data from a connected service such as your email or calendar.
| Offline | Needs a connection |
|---|---|
| Reading and editing cases and clients | The AI assistant and drafting |
| Creating and completing tasks | Legal research |
| Writing notes | Uploading documents |
| Browsing what has already synced | Email, calendar and other integrations |
How syncing works
Syncing runs quietly in both directions whenever you have a connection. Changes made on your laptop go up; changes made by colleagues, or by you in the browser, come down. You do not start it or wait for it.
The first sync after signing in fetches your workspace and can take a moment on a large one. After that only changes move, so it is quick.
When two people edit the same thing
If you edit a case offline while a colleague edits the same case, the more recent change wins when your work syncs. Deletions take precedence: something deleted stays deleted rather than reappearing because an older copy was still holding it.
In practice this is rarely visible, because two people seldom edit the same field within the same window. It is worth knowing if you plan to work offline for a long stretch on matters colleagues are also touching. The longer you are disconnected, the more chance there is of overlap.
Approvals and payments
You can draft a requisition or prepare work offline, but steps that route something for sign-off should be taken online. Approval chains are worked out on the server, using your firm’s policy and its current membership. Those decisions need to be made against live data, not a local copy that may be hours old.
Signing out
Sync before you sign out if you have been working offline, so nothing is left only on the laptop. Being online with the app open is enough. It will have caught up.
Note that the local copy is exactly that: firm data on a laptop. Whole-disk encryption (FileVault on macOS) and a screen lock are worth having on any machine that holds client matters.