The one-liner: your matters never leave this machine unless you turn on a cloud feature, per matter — and even then, only the text you direct to it, only while it's on.
There is no Lexware server
Lexware is a desktop application, not a web service. There is no account to create, no sign-in, no cloud backend that holds your data. Everything a matter is made of — the documents, the text extracted from them, the chronology, the pleadings analysis, your excerpts and notes — lives in a local database on your own Mac, under your user account.
We don't collect telemetry. We don't run analytics. The application doesn't phone home to tell us what you opened or how you used it. We have no way to see your matters, because they are never sent to us.
Your originals are never altered
When you point Lexware at a brief folder, it indexes the files in place and read-only — it never moves, renames or rewrites your source documents. Importing an eBrief ZIP or a compiled court book unpacks a working copy into Lexware's own folder (or a destination you choose); your delivered brief is left exactly as it arrived.
The two cloud features — and they're both off by default
Lexware can do everything in its core loop without sending a single byte of a matter anywhere. There are exactly two optional features that can transmit matter content to a third party, each separate, each opt-in:
1. Cloud AI for extraction & review (Vertex / Gemini)
By default, Lexware extracts dates using a model that runs entirely on your Mac — nothing is sent anywhere. You can instead choose Google's Vertex AI as the provider in Settings. That is a deliberate, gated choice (it needs a one-time passphrase to unlock).
Be aware this is a global provider choice, not a per-matter consent: while Vertex is the selected provider, running date-extraction on any matter sends that document's text to Google. The AI assistant on the Review screen offers the same Vertex option in its own provider control — choosing it there likewise sends the candidate text being reviewed to Google. Switch back to the local engine (in both places) to keep everything on your machine. For privileged work, leave it local unless you specifically intend that text to go to Google.
2. The Claude assistant
The optional drafting assistant is a separate, per-matter integration. It is off for every matter until you explicitly enable it for the matter you want it on. While it's off, no new assistant work can start; the feature only prepares local files.
Consent is re-checked between chunks of work, so turning it off stops the next step rather than killing a request already in flight — cancel an active job if you need transmission to stop immediately. Every prompt sent is stored verbatim on the matter as your own audit record.
Both cloud features are independent and both are off until you turn them on. The default state of Lexware sends nothing, anywhere.
Nothing enters your chronology without you
This isn't a privacy point so much as a control one, but it's the same philosophy. Lexware never writes events to your chronology on its own. It proposes candidate dates; you review and confirm. (There are two deliberate, per-matter, opt-in exceptions for confident dates, and every one is recorded in an audit log — but the default is that you decide what is true about your matter.)
Logs never contain document content
Lexware keeps a small local diagnostic log to help when something breaks. It records paths and event names only — never the content of your documents. Those paths can include file and folder names (which might carry a matter or party name), so if you ever send a log with a problem report, you can glance over it and redact first. Problem reports are never sent automatically: the in-app report opens a pre-filled email containing only the app version and your macOS version, which you send yourself.
Where your data lives
Your matters live in a single folder on your Mac:
~/Library/Application Support/Lexware/
To back up a matter, quit Lexware and copy that folder somewhere safe (Time Machine already covers it if you use it). Because it's just files on your disk, you remain in complete control of where your matter data is, who can reach it, and how it's retained or destroyed — exactly as you would with any other file on your machine.