Privacy policy

Local Motion is built to assist with legal proceedings — a context where privacy lapses are bar complaints and a breach of attorney-client communications is unconscionable. This policy explains exactly what data Local Motion handles, what it does and does not transmit, and the controls you have.

1. What Local Motion handles

Local Motion processes four classes of data during operation:

• Audio — captured live from your microphone and from your system audio output (via WASAPI loopback on Windows).
• Transcripts — text produced by the speech-to-text provider you configure. Held in a 60–120 second rolling window in memory.
• Library data — the JSON files containing your cases, court rules, factual knowledge, demands, and prompt template. Held on your local disk.
• API keys — read from environment variables at process start, never written to disk by Local Motion.

2. What leaves your machine

The boundary is strict and worth understanding:

Audio

Audio is captured locally and buffered in memory only. Audio is sent only to the speech-to-text provider you configure (e.g., OpenAI Whisper, Groq Whisper, or any OpenAI-compatible host you point at in Settings). The audio is sent in 4-second WAV chunks via HTTPS multipart upload. If you configure the local Whisper option, no audio leaves your machine at all.

Audio is never stored beyond its in-memory buffer. Audio is never sent to your LLM (Anthropic, OpenAI, etc).

Transcribed text

Once your speech-to-text provider returns text, that text is sent to your configured LLM along with your loaded library (cases, rules, knowledge) as a system prompt. The LLM receives only text — never audio. Your library content is included on every call to enable the agent to cite from it; this is the entire point of the tool.

API keys

Local Motion reads keys only from environment variables you set. Keys are never written to config files, never logged, never sent over IPC in plaintext, and never transmitted anywhere except in HTTP Authorization or x-api-key headers to the provider you explicitly named.

Network allowlist

Local Motion's outbound HTTP requests are made directly to the provider hosts you configure. The default configuration permits api.groq.com, api.openai.com, and api.anthropic.com. Custom endpoints you configure are added to the allowlist as you set them. No telemetry, analytics, or usage data is sent anywhere else.

3. Session logs

By default, no session log is written. If you opt in via config.logging.session_log = true, Local Motion appends one JSONL line per agent response to a file under %APPDATA%\local-motion\sessions\. The line contains the timestamp, latency, the IDs the agent cited, and the suggested text. Audio is never logged. Source transcripts are never logged in this default mode.

Session logs are local-only. Local Motion has no cloud sync, no support-portal upload mechanism, and no "phone home" path.

4. Document ingest

When you upload a document via the Ingest tab, Local Motion:

• Stashes a copy of the original file under config/ingest/<timestamp>-<filename> for provenance.
• Extracts plain text locally (via pdf-extract or docx-rs).
• Sends the extracted text to your configured LLM (Anthropic by default for ingest) to identify proposed library entries.
• Renders the proposals for your review. Nothing is merged until you click Accept and Merge.

Document text reaches the LLM; the original PDF or DOCX does not. The full text content is part of the prompt and will count against your provider's context.

5. Third-party data handling

Local Motion does not control how OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq, or any other provider you configure handles the data you send them. Their published policies and terms apply. We recommend:

• Enabling zero-data-retention (ZDR) at Anthropic via the appropriate header where eligible.
• Reviewing OpenAI's API data usage policy — by default API data is not used to train OpenAI models.
• Reviewing Groq's data retention policy.
• For maximally sensitive matters, configuring Local Motion to use a local Whisper model and your own self-hosted LLM via the Custom provider option.

For the privilege analysis underlying this — why disclosure to a third-party AI vendor under the "necessary for the rendition of legal services" framework is treated analogously to e-discovery or research vendors, and how the work-product doctrine of Hickman v. Taylor applies to the library itself — see the objections page.

6. Cookies and the marketing site

This website (localmotion.ai) does not set tracking cookies, does not load third-party analytics, and does not embed advertising scripts. The only network requests made are for the fonts (Google Fonts), Tailwind CSS (via jsDelivr), and Alpine.js (via jsDelivr) needed to render the page. Your email — if you submit it via the early-access form — is sent only to our form provider (Noundry) and used only to send you Local Motion access information.

7. Your controls

• Provider choice. You select your STT and LLM providers. You can change them at any time, including to local-only options.
• Logging. Session logs are off by default. You opt in; you can turn off again at any time; you can delete the local files.
• Library data. Everything is in %APPDATA%\local-motion\config\. You can edit, back up, or delete any of it directly.
• Ingest provenance. Uploaded documents and their cached copies live in config/ingest/ on your machine and can be deleted at any time.
• Email. If you signed up for early access and want to be removed, email privacy@localmotion.ai.

8. Not legal advice

Local Motion is a research and preparation tool. It does not provide legal advice. The text it surfaces is generated by language models from data you provided. You are responsible for verifying any citation, fact, or argument before relying on it in a proceeding. See the Terms & legal for the full disclaimer.

9. Updates to this policy

We will date and version this policy at the top of the page on any material change. If you've signed up for early access and a change materially affects how your data is handled, we will email you.

10. Contact

Privacy questions: privacy@localmotion.ai
General contact: contact page