StarForge Consulting

An AI assistant that never leaves your office.

StarForge installs a private document assistant inside small law, CPA, and advisory firms. It runs on a box in your office, reads only your files, and has no vendor terms of service to review.

Book a 30-minute confidentiality check See how it works

San Antonio, Texas. Installed on site by the engineer you talk to.

Floor plan of a firm's office The AI assistant, the firm's documents, and its staff all sit inside the office boundary. The internet is outside, and the connection to it is crossed out. The internet cloud AI vendors and their terms File room matters, client files, firm knowledge Partners and staff ask questions, draft, get cited answers Office Office Closet the assistant lives here Your office Nothing crosses this line.
The assistant runs on hardware you own, on your network, behind your door.

Your staff are already using AI. The rules now ask you to supervise it.

  • Texas Ethics Opinion 705 asks lawyers to understand how any AI tool works, review its terms of service and data-security protections, and train staff on it. Tools that learn from what you type are a heightened concern and may need client consent. Professional Ethics Committee for the State Bar of Texas, Opinion 705, February 2025
  • The ABA reached the same place a year earlier: informed client consent before confidential information goes into a self-learning AI tool, and competence means understanding the tool you use. ABA Formal Opinion 512, July 2024
  • For advisers, FINRA says using a vendor's AI does not shift responsibility to the vendor, and the SEC's current exam priorities include testing how firms supervise AI use and safeguard client data. FINRA Regulatory Notice 24-09; SEC FY2026 Examination Priorities

Most firms of five to twenty people I talk to have two or three unsanctioned AI tools already in use. Each one carries a terms-of-service review nobody has done. An assistant that runs inside your office has no third-party terms to review, no vendor to oversee, and nothing to disclose about where client data went.

What you get

A working system, documented well enough that any competent technician could rebuild it without me.

  • A small, quiet computer that sits in a closet or under a desk. You buy it directly from the manufacturer and hold the warranty. For a firm of three to eight, one desktop unit is enough; larger firms get a second unit or a private rack.
  • An open-weight language model running on that machine. Nothing is sent to a cloud service, ever. The machine is not reachable from the public internet.
  • A chat interface your staff open in a browser, with individual accounts. Ask a question, get an answer with citations to the specific documents it came from.
  • An index over your document share, so the assistant can draft from and search across your own matters, engagements, and firm knowledge. It is a drafting and retrieval aid, not legal research.
  • Full-disk encryption, local-only sign-in, backups, and a written runbook covering rebuild, model updates, backup and restore, and adding or removing users.
  • One on-site training session with your team, on your documents.

The install is a fixed fee: half at signing, half at handover. Ongoing support is a flat monthly rate covering quarterly model and software refreshes and business-hours email. There is no per-seat pricing and nothing that grows as your firm uses it more.

How it works

  1. Confidentiality check

    Thirty minutes on the phone or at your office. We list the AI tools your firm actually uses and where client data goes with each one. You keep the findings whether or not we go further.

    No cost.

  2. Assessment and policy

    A written inventory of AI use at the firm, mapped to your professional obligations, a firm AI-use policy you can adopt as written, and a deployment recommendation. If the right answer for your firm is a cloud tool with training turned off, the recommendation says so.

    Fixed fee. Two weeks. Half on signature, half on delivery.

  3. Install

    Hardware ordered in your name, system built and hardened, index built over your documents, staff trained on site. You see it working on your own files before handover.

    Fixed fee. Half at signing, half at handover.

  4. Support

    Quarterly refresh of the model and software, backups checked, business-hours email for questions. Anything beyond that is quoted before it is done.

    Flat monthly rate, twelve-month term.

Who this is for

A good fit

  • Law, CPA, and registered investment advisory firms of three to twenty people
  • Firms whose clients ask, or will ask, where their information goes
  • A managing partner who wants one documented system rather than a dozen personal subscriptions
  • San Antonio and the surrounding area, so I can be on site

Not a good fit

  • Firms that need legal research or case law lookup. This is not that, and I will not sell it as that.
  • Firms that need the very latest frontier model. The assistant is capable, and it is roughly a year behind the best cloud models. I will show you the difference on your own documents.
  • Medical practices, for now. Handling protected health information needs a business associate agreement I am not yet set up to sign.

Straight answers

Why not just use Microsoft Copilot or ChatGPT Business?

For many firms that is the right answer, and if it is right for yours the assessment will say so. The difference is oversight. With a cloud tool you are reviewing terms of service, tracking subprocessors, and supervising a vendor. With a box in your office there is nothing to review and nobody to supervise. Some firms value that on its own. Some do not.

Is it as smart as the cloud tools?

No. It is roughly where the best cloud models were a year or so ago, which is more than enough for drafting from your own documents, summarizing a file, and answering questions with citations. You will see it side by side with a cloud tool on your own documents before deciding anything.

What about hallucinations?

The assistant answers from your documents and cites the specific ones it used, so you can check its work. It does no legal research. The engagement letter says plainly that it is a drafting and retrieval aid and that the licensed professional verifies every output. Courts have sanctioned lawyers for filing unchecked AI text, and nothing about this system changes who is responsible.

Who maintains it if something happens to you?

The runbook. It covers rebuilding the system from scratch, swapping the model, restoring from backup, and managing users. It is written for a competent technician who has never seen the system, and you own it along with the hardware and the data.

Do you resell the hardware?

No. You buy it directly, in your name, and hold the manufacturer's warranty. I do not want to be the middleman on a warranty claim, and you do not want to pay a markup for that.

How long does an install take?

About two weeks from the hardware arriving, most of it building and checking the document index. Training is one on-site session.

Robert Carnie

Robert Carnie

I am an infrastructure engineer in San Antonio. For the past ten years I have built and hardened systems for cleared U.S. federal programs, where the rule was that data stayed inside the boundary and every system had to be documented well enough for someone else to run it. The same discipline, full-disk encryption, local-only sign-in, no public exposure, and a runbook, is what goes into every install.

StarForge Consulting LLC is my firm. The private assistant offering exists because I run the same stack in my own office and could not find anyone selling it to small professional firms without a subscription attached.

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Start with the confidentiality check.

Thirty minutes, no cost, and you keep the findings either way. If a private assistant is not the right answer for your firm, I will tell you.

Book a 30-minute confidentiality check

Or write to [email protected].