Canner for Law Firms.
Your firm handles privileged client data. The tools your team builds shouldn’t send it across the border.
Canner lets lawyers and legal-ops teams build internal tools, intake forms, and client portals on Canadian-owned infrastructure — solicitor-client data stays in Quebec, under Canadian law.
Legal work runs on confidential information — matter files, client PII, privileged communications — governed by solicitor-client privilege, the Law Societies’ confidentiality rules (the Federation of Law Societies Model Code of Professional Conduct, the Law Society of Ontario, the Barreau du Québec), and PIPEDA. Firms increasingly want to build their own small tools: a client intake form, a document-status tracker, a conflicts-check lookup, an AI-assisted research helper. The blocker is where those tools run. Most modern hosting is US-incorporated and subject to the CLOUD Act, which is a hard problem for privileged data. Canner removes it — 100% Canadian-owned, hosted only in Montreal.
Privilege can’t cross the border
A US-hosted tool holding matter data is exposed to US legal process under the CLOUD Act, regardless of encryption. For solicitor-client privileged material, that’s a risk most firms won’t accept.
Client and regulator scrutiny
Corporate clients — and law societies — increasingly ask where firm data lives. “A US cloud with a Canadian region” is not the same answer as “a Canadian-owned host under Canadian law.”
Non-developers need to ship
Legal-ops and knowledge-management teams can now build real tools with AI, but they need somewhere safe and simple to host them — without standing up infrastructure or hiring DevOps.
Client intake & matter portals
Deploy a secure intake form or a client-facing matter portal that writes to a Postgres database hosted in Montreal. HTTPS and per-tenant isolation come standard.
AI research & drafting helpers
Host a tool that calls an LLM API with your key kept server-side. Prompts and results transit your Canadian server, not a US SaaS you don’t control.
Internal dashboards & lookups
Conflicts checks, docket trackers, billing dashboards — build them as small apps, connect a database, and give the firm a private URL or custom domain.
Restore points you control
Give each matter database a recovery window you choose (point-in-time recovery on a dedicated instance, $9/mo), keep encrypted backups you can also copy to your own bucket, and give paralegals or analysts a named read-only role.
Canner is 100% Canadian-owned and operates solely from Montreal, Quebec — it is not a “US person” and is not subject to the US CLOUD Act. That makes it a defensible answer to PIPEDA and Quebec’s Law 25 obligations, and to law-society expectations around confidentiality. A signed Data Processing Agreement and a data-residency attestation are available for your compliance file, with the Compliance add-on ($29/mo).
Is client data actually kept in Canada?
Yes. Compute and managed Postgres both run in Montreal. Canner has no US affiliate, so there is no CLOUD Act exposure.
Can non-technical staff use this?
Yes. Drag-and-drop deploys let legal ops ship a tool an AI helped them build, with no server administration. Developers can use GitHub or the CLI.
Can we get a DPA and residency attestation?
Yes — both come with the Compliance add-on ($29/mo), along with your audit log. Enterprise adds a 99.9% uptime SLA and priority support.
What about privileged AI use?
Keep your LLM API key as a server-side environment variable so requests originate from your Canadian host. For contractual guarantees, the Enterprise plan covers it.
Can we restore the database to a point in time, and who controls retention?
Yes. Add the dedicated instance ($9/mo per project) and you get point-in-time recovery with a window you choose, from 1 to 35 days. You restore any moment into a new database, never over the live one. Scheduled backups on every plan use a retention you set, and each backup is encrypted with its own key, destroyed when the backup is deleted. You can also copy backups to an S3-compatible bucket you own. Canner runs in a single region in Montreal, without automatic failover.
Build without the sovereignty headache.
Tell us about your use case and we’ll help you scope it — from a single internal tool to a firm-wide rollout. For detailed or regulated projects, this reaches our team directly.