Docketwise vs eImmigration by Cerenade: how they compare in 2026
Docketwise and eImmigration by Cerenade sell the same product to the same firms: immigration case management built around a library of government forms, with AI that reads passports and other documents into those forms. Docketwise takes its AI commitments from its parent group. The 8am Terms of Service bar training on customer content by contract and hold the models to a 30 day retention limit. 8am also names OpenAI as the provider and publishes AI principles under which a person approves every result. eImmigration puts its commitments in its own paperwork. Its subscription agreement and data processing addendum of 20 February 2026 set out a dedicated database for each customer in the United States, five named subprocessors and breach notice within 24 hours. They also commit to deletion within 30 days with written certification, and carve the costs of a data incident out of the liability cap. Each of its 22 integrations says what moves. Both publish full price lists.
Which one fits
Choose Docketwise if
- You want a contract term, not a policy page, keeping client documents out of model training. The 8am Terms of Service that govern Docketwise state that customer content is not used to train or fine tune any model, 8am's or a third party's, and that the models behind DocketWise IQ may retain content for no more than 30 days and may not train on it.
- Your security review requires a SOC 2 report. Docketwise is covered by the SOC 2 Type 2 attestation held at the 8am level, states so on its own pages, and points to a public trust center at trust.8am.com where the current report is available. eImmigration claims no SOC 2 attestation of its own.
- You already run Clio, MyCase or PracticePanther. Docketwise names integrations with all three, alongside QuickBooks, Dropbox, OneDrive, Gmail, Outlook and Google Calendar, and publishes an open API with a developers page, so it can sit beside a general practice system rather than replace it.
Choose eImmigration by Cerenade if
- You need to know where client files sit and what happens to them when you leave. eImmigration keeps each customer in its own dedicated database on Microsoft Azure in the United States, and its agreement returns your data and then deletes it within 30 days of your confirming receipt, to NIST sanitization standards, with written certification.
- You want the vendor to carry the cost if it loses your clients' data. eImmigration's agreement carves the costs of a data incident caused by Cerenade or its subprocessors, including your notification, legal and forensic costs and any regulatory fines, out of the liability cap, and commits to notice within 24 hours.
- You need AI translation in more languages than Spanish and Arabic. eImmigration's Translator moves questionnaires and government forms between English and twelve other languages, including Farsi, Pashto, Ukrainian and Vietnamese, and its Summarizer and Extractor come standard on the $55 Starter plan, where Docketwise's AI starts on the $100 Pro plan.
At a glance
All 15 axes, side by side
The same grid applied to every vendor in the index, graded from public sources. Hover a grade to see what the letter means on that axis.
AI Centrality
How much of the product is actually AI. Whether the machine learning is the mechanism the buyer is paying for or a feature layered onto conventional software, and whether the vendor is specific about which is which.
DocketWise IQ is a core feature layered on a practice system that works without it. The company was founded in 2016 around its forms library, which fills USCIS, EOIR, DOL and DOS forms from one multilingual questionnaire. Case management, deadline and priority date tracking, USCIS status updates, eSignature, invoicing and trust accounting sit around it. The Basic plan, at $80 per user per month on annual billing, carries no AI and still runs an immigration practice, while DocketWise IQ comes with Pro and Advanced. The AI adds two assistants. The Document Assistant reads scanned passports and green cards and maps names, dates and other details into forms and client profiles. The Writing Assistant edits client messages and translates them into Spanish or Arabic. 8am launched further IQ capabilities across its products in June 2026, and Docketwise lists AI for immigration firms among its five product areas, beside forms, case management, CRM and reporting.
The AI is a layer on a case management system that has been sold for three decades, and the system is the product. Four AI Workmates are Cerenade's own: Summarizer, which digests an uploaded PDF, pasted text or a URL; Extractor, which pulls data from passports, USCIS receipts and other PDFs including handwritten ones and maps it into client and case fields; the Translator behind thirteen-language intake and form translation; and Report.AI, which answers caseload questions in plain language and offers to run the report. Two of the four are standard on every plan, one sits inside a premium feature. Around them sit more than 300 government forms with version control, 120 case templates, e-filing to USCIS, State and Labor, travel-history import from CBP, a client portal, billing and trust accounting, none of which needs a model. A firm that switched every Workmate off would still have the product it bought.
Citation Accuracy and Hallucination Disclosure
Whether the vendor publishes measured accuracy on citations and assertions, grounds output to primary sources, and says plainly what its system does when it does not know. Legal has a documented public record of fabricated citations reaching filed briefs, so an untested claim of accuracy is not evidence.
Docketwise says automatic form filling brings measurable accuracy and time savings, that the Document Assistant reduces manual entry and improves accuracy, and that the platform minimizes filing errors, which it calls the leading source of error in immigration practice. No figure, error rate, sample, test set or evaluation is published, and no failure mode is named. Extraction runs on the customer's own uploaded identity documents and fills named agency forms rather than generating free text. Nothing describes how a mapped value is traced back to the page it came from or whether the source is shown to the reviewer. The product cites no legal authority, so citator checks and linked primary sources do not apply. The 8am group publishes a Case Assistant that returns answers with citations traced to their source, but its own availability table places it in MyCase rather than DocketWise.
Accuracy is asserted on the marketing pages and measured nowhere. The AI Workmates page promises error-free, ready-to-file packets and the home page promises to eliminate data entry errors; the Extractor is described as preventing data entry mistakes. No accuracy rate, error rate, evaluation or test set is published for any of the four features, and no failure mode is named. Grounding is inherent rather than documented: each Workmate works on material the firm hands it, so a summary comes from the document uploaded and an extraction from the PDF supplied, but nothing describes how a field is matched, whether a low-confidence extraction is flagged, or how a reader checks a translated form against the English original. The one published acknowledgment that AI can produce errors sits in a resource piece about using AI generally, not in any description of these features.
Autonomy and Oversight Model
What the system decides on its own, what a lawyer must approve, and whether the vendor documents where the review point sits. A tool that drafts under review and a tool that files without one are different products and different risks.
Under 8am's January 2026 AI principles the AI does not hit send: it offers recommendations that the user reviews, edits and approves before anything happens. 8am's AI page adds that the firm decides when AI is used and who can use it, and that nothing runs in the background. The 8am Terms of Service say output may not replace professional judgment or human review. The workflow is attorney driven, from questionnaire to populated form to signed filing, with Reverse Autofill and shared questionnaire editing as review points. An extracted value carries no confidence indicator and no marker showing that the AI filled it. Nothing describes what happens when a scan is illegible or a field cannot be matched. On a government form signed under penalty of perjury, a wrong alien registration number looks the same as a right one.
The expectation of human review is published, and no control inside the product is described. Vendor resource material tells firms that a person must check anything legal every time, and that a paralegal should verify automatically populated forms before anything moves forward. That is a real position, addressed to how a firm should run itself rather than to what this system does. On the product pages the framing is assistive throughout: the AI completes intakes, extracts, translates and reports. Nothing states whether extracted data lands in a client or case profile before or after someone confirms it, whether a translated form is marked as machine translated when it reaches the client, or what happens after an extraction is wrong. Intake Review exists as a standard feature, but it reviews the client's questionnaire rather than the model's output.
Operational and Outcome Evidence
Named, dated evidence that the product works in production at real firms or legal departments. Case studies with figures and identified customers count. Unattributed testimonials and launch announcements do not.
Five customer firms appear by logo, among them Kurzban Kurzban Tetzeli and Pratt, Davis & Associates, Rushton Hoffmann & Associates and Fogle Law Firm. Three testimonials carry a named attorney, title and firm, from Saja Raoof of Saja Raoof, Inc. Law Corporation, Shahzad Khan of Shahzad R. Khan Legal and Anna Ernest of Ernest Law Group. Published success stories include Jane Lee's move from LawLogix after ten years, Immigrant Justice Corps on nonprofit use, and Ismail Mohammed, a sole practitioner who reports cutting case preparation time by 50%. Docketwise's headline claim is that firms spend 75% less time on admin, with no method or sample given. Law360 reported that the AILA Marketplace Study 2022 ranked Docketwise the most used immigration case management software.
Customers are named in quantity, and the figures sit apart from them. More than a dozen attributed testimonials carry a name, a role and a firm, among them managing attorneys, DOJ accredited representatives and a chief operating officer, several describing a decade or more of use. The logo wall on the pricing page names RAICES, The Legal Aid Society, Quarles & Brady, CARECEN, Immigrant Defenders Law Center and the YMCA. The published numbers are of a different kind: four times faster case preparation, ten days quicker client intakes, three times faster growth, 17,000 legal professionals. They are averages with no firm attached, no period and no method. None of the named evidence is about an AI Workmate; the testimonials concern forms, reporting and support.
Privilege and Confidentiality Posture
How client confidences are handled: attorney client privilege and work product treatment, segregation of one client matter from another, whether client data trains any model, and what the vendor commits to in writing rather than in marketing.
Customer content and AI inputs and outputs may not be used to train or fine tune any model, 8am's or a third party's, under the 8am Terms of Service, which name 8am DocketWise. They limit the models behind DocketWise IQ to keeping that content for up to 30 days without training on it. 8am's AI page says the AI reaches only data a user already has rights to view, and that the safeguards keeping one customer's data from another extend to the AI. Data is encrypted at rest and in transit, administrators set role based access, and two factor authentication comes with every plan. The terms reserve aggregated human and automated review of inputs and outputs to monitor accuracy, so a person may read a prompt that no model trains on. Nothing addresses privilege or work product directly, and access separates by user and office rather than by matter.
The commitments are contractual, current and readable before signing. The Software Subscription Agreement of 20 February 2026 makes each party's confidential information the exclusive property of the disclosing party, usable only for the purposes of the agreement, and deems the subscriber's database files and backups the subscriber's own confidential information. The Data Processing Addendum of the same date goes further. Cerenade may not retain, use or disclose personal data beyond performing the services, may not combine it with data from any other source, and may not sell or share it. Staff must be under written confidentiality agreements, with access limited to those performing the services, and a data protection officer is named. Privilege and attorney work product are never addressed in those terms, on a platform holding asylum declarations and family histories. Separation inside a firm relies on permissions rather than walls.
UPL and Professional Responsibility Posture
Whether the vendor is clear that it supplies a tool rather than legal advice, who its audience is, and how it addresses unauthorized practice of law, competence and supervision duties, and jurisdiction limits. ABA Formal Opinion 512 is the reference point. Where the advice line is not the duty a product raises, the axis is read through the nearest professional duty it does raise: judicial conduct rules and the reviewing duty for products sold only to courts, and the duty to bill for time actually spent for products that draft time entries.
Both the 8am Terms of Service and the 8am IQ Usage Policy name DocketWise or DocketWise IQ. Both say the platform serves legal, accounting and other client based professionals in the United States and Canada. They say 8am gives no legal advice and does not practice law, and that customers must follow their own professional conduct rules. Unauthorized practice of law is prohibited, and output may not replace professional judgment or human review. Docketwise sells to attorneys and also to legal service providers and nonprofits, in the one field in the United States where accredited representatives who are not lawyers may lawfully practice before the agency. The terms do not say whether a DOJ accredited representative falls inside their audience, or what such a representative may do with the drafting tool.
A position on human review is published, and it is about how a firm should use AI rather than about what this product is. Vendor resource material says that if AI assists with research, drafting or document review a person needs to check it every time, that a review step should be built into standing procedures so it is never optional, and that a paralegal should verify auto-populated forms before anything moves forward. Nothing on a product page or in the agreement states what eimmigration is and is not, who inside an organization may rely on an extracted field or a machine translation, or any jurisdiction limit. This matters more than usual here because the product is sold to non-profit legal service providers, universities and corporate teams alongside law firms, and because DOJ accredited representatives appear in its own testimonials. The nearest thing in the agreement is a promise of reasonable effort rather than a guarantee that published forms are accurate and current.
AI Governance and Bias Disclosure
Published governance over model behavior: who owns it inside the vendor, what is tested before release, and what is disclosed about disparate output across matter types, parties, or populations.
8am's January 2026 statement of AI principles, written by its principal product manager for AI, covers 8am IQ, which includes DocketWise IQ. It commits to AI that assists rather than decides, to fair, transparent and explainable output, and to continuous evaluation. 8am says it uses proprietary evaluation metrics to monitor accuracy and detect errors, with prompts preconfigured for specific legal tasks. The metrics and their results are not published, and no owner is named for AI decisions or for what is tested before a release. The Document Assistant reads passports and green cards issued in many formats, scripts and transliterations, and nothing is published on how its accuracy varies across document types, issuing countries or scripts other than Latin.
Nothing is published about how the AI is governed. No one is named as accountable for what the models do, nothing describes what is tested before a change ships, no evaluation results appear, and there is no responsible AI statement or principles page. The question this product invites is left entirely open: intake questionnaires and government forms are machine-translated between English and twelve other languages including Farsi, Pashto, Ukrainian and Vietnamese, and the Extractor reads handwritten PDFs, so whether quality holds across languages, scripts and handwriting is the obvious thing a buyer would want tested. Nothing addresses it.
AI Safety and Data Stewardship
Retention, deletion, access control, and what happens to prompts and documents after they are processed. Whether the vendor states its subprocessors and its incident practice, or leaves the buyer to assume.
Administrators set role based permissions at user level, Advanced adds permission groups and multiple admin roles, and two factor authentication is available on every plan. Inside the vendor, access to customer data is limited to employees who need it, and staff must use single sign on or two factor authentication for systems holding sensitive data. Data is encrypted with AES 256 at rest and over HTTPS in transit, on AWS across several availability zones, with encrypted snapshot backups about every five minutes. Annual third party penetration tests with remediation bound by service levels, continuous vulnerability scanning and annual control self assessments are listed. A written incident protocol covers escalation, mitigation and post incident review, customers are told of critical system changes, and customer data is purged from production when a customer leaves. Docketwise also publishes a notice of a data incident. In October 2025 an unauthorized party used valid credentials to copy third party partner repositories, some used in a data migration pipeline that held law firm records. Personal information of clients of some customer firms, including Social Security and passport numbers, was taken. Notices went to affected individuals from 3 April 2026 with two years of identity monitoring, and the FBI was told. Docketwise says it has added security measures since and is reviewing its policies to prevent a repeat. No subprocessor list is published.
All of it is published, current and contractual. Deletion: on termination the customer's data is returned first, then deleted within 30 days of confirmed receipt, to NIST media sanitization standards, with written certification that it was done. Retention: processing continues until the customer says stop in writing, and personal data is deleted when the customer asks. Access: staff are under written confidentiality agreements, access is limited to those performing the services, and the customer controls roles and permissions in the product. Subprocessors: five are named on a page incorporated into the addendum, each with its purpose and its processing location, with advance notice of any change and a thirty-day objection right that can end the contract. Incidents: notice within 24 hours, with the customer controlling who gets told, and the customer's notification, forensic and legal costs expressly carved out of the liability cap. The agreement adds encryption in transit and at rest, seven-day point-in-time restore and geo-replication.
AI Liability and Recourse
What the vendor stands behind contractually when its output is wrong. Indemnities, caps, carve outs, insurance, and whether any of it is published or only reachable through a negotiated agreement.
The 8am Terms of Service, updated August 2026 and naming 8am DocketWise, exclude indirect and consequential damages. They cap 8am's total liability at the net fees it earned from the customer in the three months before the event giving rise to the claim. For the AI, 8am gives no warranty on the accuracy, completeness or reliability of output, says it is not obliged to verify output, and disclaims liability for errors in output or for reliance on it. The customer indemnifies 8am against third party claims connected with its use of the services, and no indemnity or warranty runs the other way. Document Assistant output goes onto forms filed with federal agencies, so an incorrect alien registration number or date of entry on a submitted form is a loss these terms leave with the firm.
There is a real published allocation of risk, and the accuracy of what the software produces sits outside it. Cerenade indemnifies the subscriber against patent, trademark and copyright claims arising from the software, with the conditions spelled out. Liability is capped at twelve months of subscription fees, consequential and indirect damages are excluded both ways, and the functionality warranty's sole remedy is that Cerenade corrects the software. One exception favors the customer: the costs of a data incident caused by Cerenade or its subprocessors, including the customer's notification, legal, public relations and forensic costs and any regulatory fines, are expressly not subject to the cap. Against that, the agreement promises only reasonable effort, not a guarantee, that published forms are accurate and free of errors, and nothing addresses liability for what the AI Workmates produce. No insurance is published.
Practice Systems Integration Depth
How deeply the product reaches into the systems legal work already lives in: document management such as iManage and NetDocuments, Word and Outlook, contract lifecycle management, matter management, e-billing, and court filing systems.
Connections cover Clio, MyCase and PracticePanther for practice management, QuickBooks for accounting, Dropbox and OneDrive for storage, and Gmail, Outlook and Google Calendar for email and calendar. Payments run natively through 8am LawPay, Zapier opens a route to thousands of other applications, and the product is listed on the Google Workspace Marketplace. Clio and PracticePanther compete with 8am's own MyCase, and Docketwise presents those connections as serving firms that run both. An open API is published, and Gmail and Outlook appear as add ons in the plan comparison. No page sets out which objects sync, in which direction, what authentication is required or what a firm must configure.
Twenty-two integrations are named on the integrations page, each with a line saying what moves and in which direction, which is what an implementer actually needs. Files are pulled in from OneDrive, Google Drive, Box and Dropbox; Outlook, Exchange and Gmail send client email and log threads and attachments back to the right case; expense items generated in the product are pushed to QuickBooks; HubSpot records sync so an update in either system shows in both; RingCentral answers calls and logs them to client records; WhatsApp Business messages land in the communications center; UPS, USPS, FedEx and DHL shipments are tracked from the case. Scheduling runs off the firm's own Acuity or Microsoft Bookings calendar. Underneath sit the connections that matter most in this practice area: filing to USCIS, the State Department and the Labor Department, and travel-history import from Customs and Border Protection. API access is a Complete-plan feature for accounts with ten or more users and the documentation is shared on request rather than published.
Deployment Model and Data Residency
Where the software runs and where the data sits. Multi tenant cloud, single tenant, private deployment, on premises, and whether region of residence is a published option or an enterprise conversation.
Amazon Web Services hosts Docketwise, in data centers with security staff around the clock, biometric scanning and video surveillance. Infrastructure and data are spread across several AWS availability zones for failover and disaster recovery, with encrypted snapshot backups through AWS Elastic Beanstalk about every five minutes. No AWS region or country is named and no residency option is offered. Nothing separates where documents are stored from where the Document Assistant processes them, and no tenancy model or single tenant option is described, for a product that holds identity documents and immigration histories.
Both halves of the question are answered, and the answer is the same everywhere: single tenancy, in the United States. Each customer's data sits in its own dedicated database rather than a shared one. The security page states this and the agreement bears it out, offering a copy of the subscriber's own SQL Server database on request and saying that segments or selected records cannot be extracted from it. Hosting is Microsoft Azure, with continuous replication to a second Azure data center in the United States and a seven day window for restoring to any point. All five named subprocessors process in the United States. No region option is offered, nothing differs between the three plans, and nothing says where the AI features run as distinct from where the data sits. Cerenade also reserves an express right to change the hosting facility at its discretion without notice.
Security Certifications and Trust Center
Independent attestation a buyer can pull without a sales call: SOC 2, ISO 27001, penetration test summaries, a trust center with current reports and named scope rather than a badge image.
A SOC 2 Type 2 attestation at the level of 8am LLC, the parent, covers Docketwise, and Docketwise's own pages say so, pointing to 8am's public trust center at trust.8am.com. Listed there are the 2025 SOC 2 Type 2 report, a 2026 bridge letter, and PCI DSS v4.0.1 attestations of compliance for the LawPay payment side. Docketwise's own security page describes AWS hosting with AES 256 encryption, continuous third party vulnerability scanning, and SSO or two factor authentication for staff with access to sensitive data. Annual third party penetration tests and annual control self assessments with documented corrective actions are listed beside them.
One certification is real and checkable, the rest are claims. Cerenade has certified to the U.S. Department of Commerce under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, the UK Extension and the Swiss-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, names the FTC as the enforcement authority and BBB National Programs as the dispute mechanism, and points to the public register where the certification can be looked up without a sales call. Beyond that the security page claims full compliance with GDPR and PCI DSS and a host of other standards, with no scope, no date, no auditor and no report, and says annual penetration testing is carried out without publishing anything from it. The addendum offers the most recent third-party audits or certifications to a customer on written request. No SOC 2 attestation is claimed anywhere, and the ISO 27001, FedRAMP and SOC certifications named on the security page are Microsoft Azure's, which cover the hosting layer and not this vendor. There is no trust portal.
Model Supply Chain Disclosure
Which models sit underneath, whose they are, where they run, and whether the vendor commits to telling customers when that changes. A legal buyer inherits every dependency it cannot see.
OpenAI is named as the AI partner for 8am IQ in 8am's January 2026 statement of AI principles. It says OpenAI does not train on customer data under that agreement and may keep data for up to 30 days for abuse detection. The 8am Terms of Service hold the models behind 8am IQ to the same 30 day limit without naming the provider. The privacy policy says AI inputs also pass to document parsing and optical character recognition providers, none of them named. No model or version is identified, and nothing commits to notice if the provider changes.
Four AI features ship, and nothing published says what is underneath any of them. No model, version or provider is named on the AI Workmates page, the pricing page, the security page, the privacy policy, the agreement or the addendum. Nothing states where inference runs, and there is no commitment to tell customers when a model changes, although there is a detailed one for subprocessor changes. The subprocessor list, updated on 20 February 2026 and incorporated into the addendum, names five processors: Microsoft Azure for hosting, HubSpot, SendGrid, Userpilot and Zoom. None is identified as a model provider. A buyer cannot tell which model reads its clients' passports or drafts its translations.
Commercial Transparency
Whether a buyer can learn what this costs without entering a sales process: published rates, the unit being charged, what sits behind an enterprise tier, and what implementation adds.
Docketwise publishes per user monthly rates in both billing cadences. Basic is $80, Pro $100 and Advanced $120 on annual billing, and $90, $120 and $140 billed monthly. The unit is a seat per user with unlimited cases. Plan contents appear in three plan cards and in a comparison table of about forty rows covering case management, forms, CRM, DocketWise IQ and administration. The table shows the AI in Pro and above, and where eFiling, eSignature and permission groups sit. The terms around the price are published too, with a seven day free trial, no setup fees for standard accounts and free data migration on annual Advanced plans. Advanced can be started through a free trial signup, with a demo route beside it. There is no unpriced enterprise tier, and the one variable cost, LawPay transaction processing, is disclosed with fees waived for new subscribers.
A firm can work out what this costs without speaking to anyone. Three plans are published with both billing cadences: Starter at $60 per user per month, or $55 billed annually, with one premium feature and 10 GB of storage per user; Essentials at $90, or $82 annually, with four premium features and unlimited storage; Complete at $110, or $100 annually, with all premium features, unlimited storage and API access for accounts of ten or more users. Extra premium features on the lower plans cost $15 each per user per month. The unit is the user and the page states there are no per-case fees, no setup fees and no fees. Implementation is priced too: a standard data import is $1,000, with eighteen source platforms named and a custom migration quoted separately. Four discount routes are described, including 50 percent off for non-profits, schools and universities on an annual term.
Firm and Practice Coverage
Who the product is actually built for. AmLaw, midlaw, small firm and solo, in house departments, government and courts, and which practice areas are supported rather than merely claimed.
Docketwise declares immigration law its only practice area and builds its positioning on that boundary, saying its data model, workflows and forms library are built around immigration practice rather than general practice. It lists solo attorneys, boutique firms, larger immigration teams, and legal aid and nonprofit immigration organizations, with roles for attorneys, paralegals, support staff, firm administrators and consultants. Coverage is defined at the level a practitioner checks, with the forms library set out by agency across USCIS, EOIR, DOL and DOS and the electronic filing subset named form by form. Firms wanting general practice management are pointed to Clio or MyCase alongside, through published integrations. Six common use cases are published, from multilingual intake for solo practices to nonprofit caseloads.
Who this is for is set out precisely, and where it stops is not. Seven buyer pages address immigration attorneys, paralegals and caseworkers, legal ops leaders, law firms, nonprofit organizations, corporations, and schools and universities, and the feature set is mapped to each. The practice coverage is stated in numbers a buyer can check: more than 300 immigration forms with version control, 120 prebuilt case templates, family and employment matters, and filing to USCIS, the State Department and the Labor Department. Two premium features extend past immigration, one for California Judicial Council and county court forms and one described as practice areas other than immigration, such as personal injury. No boundary is stated: which matter types, visa categories or proceedings are not supported, what the system does for work before the Board of Immigration Appeals or the immigration courts, or what the module for other practice areas covers.
The 12 legal signals, side by side
Recorded rather than graded. These are the questions a practitioner has to answer before a tool touches a client matter, and the answers are taken from public material only.
Client Data in Training
Can material a lawyer puts into this product be used to train a model?
Part III of the 8am Terms of Service says 8am does not use customer content or AI inputs and outputs to train or fine tune any large language model or other generative model. The rule covers 8am's own models and third party models. The models that deliver the AI may keep content for up to 30 days and may not train on it, and the terms name 8am DocketWise as a covered product. Part I grants 8am a perpetual license over aggregated and anonymized customer content, excluding personal information, to improve the platform, and the terms reserve aggregated human and automated review of inputs and outputs. 8am's AI page says inputs and outputs may be used to develop and improve its products, while the agreement rules out training.
The word training appears nowhere on this estate, in either direction, and the contract closes the route anyway. The Data Processing Addendum of 20 February 2026, which forms part of the subscription agreement and prevails over it on anything touching personal data, says Cerenade may not retain, use or disclose personal data for any purpose other than performing the services, may not use it for any other commercial purpose, may not sell or share it, and may not combine it with data collected from any other source.
That last limb is the one that matters for a model: material from one firm's cases cannot be pooled with anything else. It is a contractual limit rather than an express prohibition on training, and the four AI features are never mentioned in the agreement, the addendum or the privacy policy.
Prompt and Output Retention
How long does the product keep what a lawyer typed, and can that be set to zero?
The large language models behind 8am IQ may keep inputs and outputs for up to 30 days under Part III of the 8am Terms of Service, and may not train on that content. 8am's AI principles name the provider as OpenAI and the purpose as abuse detection. 8am itself stores that content under its privacy policy, keeping it as needed to comply with law, provide the services, enforce the agreement or identify misuse. No period is published for case content generally, and on departure the terms let 8am keep account data under its privacy policy or a data management policy whose period is not stated.
The customer sets the window by instruction rather than by a setting. Under the addendum Cerenade processes customer data until the customer notifies it in writing to stop, and it must delete personal data if and when the customer asks. At the end of the contract the data is returned first and then deleted within 30 days of the customer confirming receipt, to NIST media sanitization standards, with written certification that it was done.
What is not addressed separately is the AI: nothing states what happens to a document uploaded to Summarizer, a passport image read by Extractor or a question put to Report.AI once the answer comes back, so those sit under the general customer data terms with no stated processing window of their own.
Ethical Walls and Matter Segregation
Does retrieval respect the firm’s ethical walls, or can the model read across them?
Role based permissions are set by administrators at user level on every plan. Advanced adds permission groups, multiple account admins and multiple branches, so a firm with more than one office can separate them. 8am's AI page says the platform enforces user permissions so the AI reaches only data a user already has rights to view. Inside the vendor, production access is limited to employees who need it. The firm configures the permission model itself, and no default configuration is published.
Nothing separates access at matter level, so screening one person from one client's file inside an office has no published mechanism.
Separation between firms is architectural and documented: each customer's data sits in its own dedicated single-tenant database rather than a partition of a shared one, which the agreement corroborates by offering a copy of the subscriber's own database and stating that selected records cannot be pulled out of it. Inside a firm the product runs its own permission model, with role-based visibility, administrator-defined access, branch and location management and a conflict of interest check that scans every client and case profile.
That is a model the firm has to configure and keep aligned, not an inherited one. Nothing published describes a matter-level wall that locks a named user out of a specific case file, which is what a firm with a conflict actually has to build.
Third Party Request and Subpoena Notice
If someone subpoenas the vendor for a firm’s data, does the firm hear about it first?
Part I of the 8am Terms of Service lets either party disclose the other's confidential information when a law, court, regulator or other government body requires it. The receiving party must give prompt notice where the law allows, so the other can seek a protective order. The terms name 8am DocketWise as a covered product, and no transparency report is published. The commitment sits in a mutual confidentiality clause, and the agreement says the privacy policy governs personal information and prevails in a conflict.
When 8am must answer a subpoena or other compulsory process about an account, the customer pays on request for the staff time it takes.
The addendum commits Cerenade to inform the customer in writing, immediately, of any request for access to or surveillance of customer data received from any government official. It names courts, data protection agencies and law enforcement, with the usual exception where the law forbids telling. On the data subject side, Cerenade must not respond directly to a request from an individual except where the law requires it, and the customer keeps sole control of the timing, method and content of any response.
This is a contractual commitment a firm can hold the vendor to. The privacy policy separately reserves the right to disclose when required by legal process. No transparency report or record of requests received is published.
Primary Law Corpus Provenance
Where does the law in this product come from, and does the vendor have the right to use it?
The forms library is defined by issuing agency across USCIS, EOIR, DOL and DOS, and Docketwise calls it the core of the product, maintained as agencies revise forms. Forms are filled from the customer's own client record and from the identity documents the Document Assistant reads. These are United States government forms, and nothing published addresses licensing or gives an update schedule, version history or review date for any form. Nothing identifies the data behind the AI models themselves.
Nothing identifies a body of source material because, on the evidence published, none of the four AI features answers from one. Summarizer digests the document, text or page the user hands it; Extractor reads the PDF supplied; the Translator works on the firm's own questionnaires and the government forms in the library; Report.AI answers from the firm's own case records. No external legal collection, licensed dataset or research collection is claimed, and the site makes no coverage claim that would depend on one. The partner drafting integrations are separate products and are not covered here.
Good Law Verification
Does the product tell you when the authority it just cited has been overruled?
Docketwise cites no cases, statutes or regulations. It fills agency forms from a client record, tracks deadlines and priority dates, and pulls case status from USCIS, so its output carries no legal proposition to check for later treatment. The nearer currency question is the form edition, since agencies reject filings made on superseded versions. Docketwise commits to maintaining the library as forms change but publishes no update cadence, version indicator or review date.
The product works on forms, filings and case records rather than on legal authority, so no subsequent-history question arises in the ordinary way and nothing describes one. Summarizer is offered for reading and recapping administrative appeals decisions; nothing states whether a decision it summarizes is checked for later treatment.
Refusal and Uncertainty Behavior
What does the product do when the answer is not in the corpus?
The Document Assistant reads scanned passports and green cards, extracts names, dates and other key details, and maps them into USCIS forms and client profiles. Nothing describes what it does when it cannot read or map a value with confidence, whether by a flag, a blank field, a highlight or a confidence rating, and no evaluation is published. Behavior on a poor scan, an unfamiliar document format, a script other than Latin or a field missing from the source is not described.
A plausible but wrong alien registration number in a filled field looks the same as a correct one on a form filed under penalty of perjury.
Nothing published describes what any of the four features does when it cannot do the job. No confidence score, no uncertainty flag, no abstention path, and no statement of what happens when the Extractor meets handwriting it cannot read, when a passport scan is poor, or when Report.AI is asked something the data cannot answer. The pages describe success only. The one acknowledgment that AI can be wrong sits in a resource piece about using AI generally and is about the firm's duty to check rather than about the product's behavior.
Fabricated Citation Record
Does a public court record exist addressing fabricated or hallucinated legal citations in output from this product?
Damien Charlotin's AI Hallucination Cases database, which tracks court decisions worldwide on hallucinated AI content, lists no matter naming Docketwise, 8am or AffiniPay. Docketwise produces no citations to legal authority; its output is client data entered on government forms.
Searched on 20 September 2026 for any court order, opinion or disciplinary record naming eimmigration or Cerenade in connection with fabricated or hallucinated citations. None located. The product does not generate legal citations, which is the usual route to such a record. The vendor's own resource material discusses hallucination risk in general terms and cites the running count of decisions involving other tools.
Bar Guidance Alignment
Has the vendor engaged in public with the ethics opinions its buyers are bound by?
An 8am post of 9 February 2026 on choosing ethical AI takes Texas Opinion 705 and Oregon Formal Opinion 2024-205 topic by topic. It sets 8am IQ's commitments on data security, model training, confidentiality, review of output and technical competence against each opinion and quotes both. The 8am IQ Usage Policy, which names DocketWise IQ, prohibits unauthorized practice of law and tailored legal advice without review by a licensed professional.
The terms require use in line with professional conduct rules. The mapped opinions address lawyers, while Docketwise also sells to legal service providers and nonprofits whose accredited representatives practice immigration law without being lawyers, and nothing published addresses their use of the AI.
Professional responsibility is engaged in general terms and no guidance is named. Vendor resource material tells firms that a person must check anything legal every time, that a review step belongs in standing procedures rather than in good intentions, and that a paralegal should verify auto-populated forms before anything moves forward; a companion guide acknowledges that AI tools can produce errors or fabricate outright and notes that ethical commitments are what make lawyers hesitate.
No rule of professional conduct, no ethics opinion and no bar-issued AI guidance is named anywhere located, and nothing maps this product to any of them.
Billing and Fee Posture
Does the vendor address what happens to the bill when the work takes an hour instead of six?
Docketwise's savings claims are aimed at firms that bill clients: firms spend 75% less time on admin, manual data entry and filing errors fall, and a sole practitioner reports cutting case preparation by 50%. Docketwise also ships the billing side, with time tracking, invoicing, trust accounting and LawPay payment processing on every plan. Nothing published says whether AI assisted work is marked on a bill, whether a client is told the tool was used, or how a flat fee per petition should change when form preparation takes minutes.
The time savings are the headline and the billing consequence is never mentioned. Published claims include getting back two days a week, preparing petitions four times faster, four times faster case preparation and ten days quicker intakes, and the product sits squarely inside the fee relationship: Time Keeper tracks time at client, case and caseworker level, and the billing module issues invoices, runs payment plans and handles trust accounting.
Nothing published addresses what a firm bills for work an AI Workmate did, whether a client is told, or how a flat fee set before these features should change after them. No per-matter record of AI-assisted work is described either.
Outside Counsel Guideline Readiness
Can a firm get this vendor through a client’s AI clause without a bespoke negotiation?
8am's public trust center at trust.8am.com lists the 2025 SOC 2 Type 2 report and a 2026 bridge letter, which Docketwise's own pages say cover it. 8am's AI principles name OpenAI as the model provider, and the privacy policy says AI inputs also go to document parsing and optical character recognition providers it does not name. No subprocessor list is published, so a firm cannot give a client the full list of third parties that processed a passport scan.
A current subprocessor list is published and incorporated into the addendum, dated 20 February 2026, naming five processors with the purpose of each, the processing location of each and whether it is required or optional: Microsoft Azure for hosting, HubSpot, SendGrid, Userpilot and Zoom, all processing in the United States. Changes carry advance notice and a thirty-day objection right. That is most of what a firm needs to answer a client's vendor questionnaire, and it can be read without an agreement in place.
What is missing is the other half of the pack: no model or model provider is named anywhere, so a firm asked which AI touches its clients' data cannot answer from what is published.
Court Disclosure Support
If a judge’s standing order requires an AI disclosure, can the product produce one?
Docketwise does not mark which values on a form the Document Assistant extracted and which a person entered, keeps no record of the model used, and captures no human check of an extracted field. It offers no export, certification form or disclosure template for AI involvement, and its eSignature and form review steps are not presented as a record of machine involvement. The output goes to federal agencies on forms signed under penalty of perjury, with a Form G-28 naming the attorney or accredited representative of record.
Nothing published addresses disclosure of AI use to a court or an agency, and nothing describes a record that would support one. Case history and audit logging exist as standard features, but they record what users did to a case rather than what a model produced, and no page states that an extraction, a translation or a summary is marked as machine-generated in the file or exportable as such. The immigration courts issued generative AI guidance in 2025, and eImmigration's published pages do not mention it.
The questions both sides leave open
Derived from the records above rather than written, so it cannot favor either vendor. Take these into both conversations and ask each side the same question.
- Good Law Verification
- Refusal and Uncertainty Behavior
- Court Disclosure Support
In summary
Docketwise
Docketwise is immigration case management software for immigration law firms, nonprofits and legal service providers. It is built around a forms library across USCIS, EOIR, DOL and DOS that auto populates from a single multilingual client questionnaire. It is based in Austin, Texas, and owned by 8am, formerly AffiniPay. According to the AI Legal Index, Docketwise publishes its prices in full, from $80 per user per month on annual billing, and declares the product exclusive to immigration law. Its AI, DocketWise IQ, reads scanned passports and green cards into forms and is included from the Pro tier, and 8am names OpenAI as the model provider behind it. Docketwise also reported a breach in October 2025, in which an unauthorized party copied partner repositories holding law firm records and took Social Security and passport numbers belonging to some customers' clients.
eImmigration by Cerenade
eImmigration by Cerenade is immigration case management software sold to immigration law firms, nonprofit legal service providers, corporate legal teams and university international offices. It holds more than 300 USCIS, State Department and Labor Department forms under version control, with electronic filing and billing. According to the AI Legal Index, its subscription agreement and data processing addendum of 20 February 2026 publish a dedicated database for each customer in the United States and five named subprocessors. They also commit to breach notice within 24 hours and deletion with written certification. eImmigration names 22 integrations, each saying what moves, and publishes full prices. Four AI Workmates summarize, extract, translate and report.
Questions buyers ask
Docketwise vs eImmigration: which is better for an immigration firm?
They sell the same product to the same firms, and each documents different things. Docketwise holds a contractual bar on training with customer content, names its model provider, publishes AI principles that keep a person approving every result, and carries a SOC 2 Type 2 attestation through 8am. eImmigration's own agreement and data processing addendum set out hosting, deletion, subprocessors and a data incident carve out from the liability cap. Both publish full prices, and the right choice turns on which of those a firm needs in writing. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of September 27, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Does Docketwise train its AI on client data?
No, and the commitment is contractual. The 8am Terms of Service, which name Docketwise as a covered product, state that customer content and AI content are not used to train or fine tune any large language model, whether 8am's or a third party's, and that the models behind DocketWise IQ may retain content for up to 30 days without training on it. The same terms reserve aggregated human and automated review of inputs and outputs to monitor accuracy. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of September 27, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
How much does eImmigration cost?
eImmigration publishes per user prices with no per case fees. Starter is $55 per user per month billed annually or $60 monthly, Essentials $82 or $90, and Complete $100 or $110, with extra premium features at $15 each per user per month. A standard data import costs $1,000, and nonprofits, schools and universities get 50 percent off on an annual term. Docketwise publishes its prices too, from $80 per user per month billed annually, with AI from the $100 Pro tier. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of September 27, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Which one integrates with Clio, QuickBooks and Outlook?
Both connect to QuickBooks and Outlook. Docketwise also names Clio, MyCase and PracticePanther, Dropbox, OneDrive, Gmail and Google Calendar, and publishes an open API. eImmigration names 22 integrations, each with a line saying what moves and in which direction, including OneDrive, Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, Gmail, HubSpot, RingCentral and WhatsApp Business, plus filing to USCIS, State and Labor and travel history import from CBP. Its API documentation is shared on request with the Complete plan. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of September 27, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Neither vendor paid for inclusion, placement or a grade, and neither reviewed this page before it published. Everything on it comes from public material on the dates shown. How the index grades.
Two things to weigh. Docketwise's strongest data commitments sit in the 8am Terms of Service, group terms that name Docketwise as a covered product. Its model provider and AI principles are named in 8am posts that cover 8am IQ across the group's products, rather than on Docketwise's own pages. eImmigration's agreement never uses the word training. Its bar on using client data for anything beyond performing the service closes that route by contract without naming it. Neither vendor reviewed this page.