SingleFile vs SixFifty: how they compare in 2026
SingleFile and SixFifty are rarely weighed against each other, because each handles a different compliance obligation that sits beside the legal department. SingleFile keeps business entities in good standing as registered agent and filer in every state, while SixFifty builds employment documents and tracks employment law. SixFifty sits in the top two bands on eight of fifteen axes and SingleFile on six of fifteen, identical on four. SixFifty publishes more about its AI. Its assistant answers from a database its own attorneys maintain, links each answer to the entries used, and runs on models it names as OpenAI's. It prices by employees and states and names Boise State University as a customer. SingleFile's lead is its contract. Its terms make entity data confidential, give notice before compelled disclosure, and pay late fees and resubmission costs when a filing is late or wrong through its own mistake. SixFifty's terms permit training on what users provide where they or their employer consent, while its privacy notice says stored prompts train no model.
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.
The AI is real and it mostly belongs to the vendor's own staff rather than to the buyer. SingleFile states the position itself and states it repeatedly: Intelligence powers our team so we can keep your entities compliant; the four-step flow reads research, collect, review, file, with our experts verifying every detail; and the workbench screenshot is the vendor's own filing queue. What the buyer receives is registered agent coverage, filings prepared and submitted on their behalf, and an entity management platform holding records, documents, a compliance calendar and permissions, none of which requires a model. Two genuinely buyer-facing capabilities keep this off the floor and are why the membership screen was satisfied: Org Charts, which generates ownership diagrams from entity data and takes plain-language instructions to edit them, and the filing readiness review, whose output is written to the customer and carries its own caveat. Both are features on a platform whose value stands without them. Checked 4 September 2026.
The AI is real and it sits on top of a platform built by lawyers rather than by models. The legal process page sets out how the product is made: documents are sourced from expert lawyers, researched and drafted by SixFifty's own in-house attorneys, and delivered through a guided question flow that asks, in the vendor's words, the same questions a lawyer would; the in-house legal team then monitors federal and state change and writes the updates. None of that is machine learning. Two features are: Ask SixFifty AI, which answers plain-language questions by retrieving from the vendor's Research database and linking back to the entries it used, and an AI merge that pushes the legal team's written updates into documents a customer has already generated. Remove both and the platform still sells a lawyer-built document generator, a maintained employment law database and a monthly update service. A buyer should understand what the AI is for here: it makes an existing corpus easier to ask questions of, and it does not write the law or the documents. Verified 20 September 2026.
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.
Accuracy is asserted across the marketing and nothing is measured, though the vendor does something most in this corpus do not. The assertions are firm: filings handled accurately and on time, every time, and entities kept compliant faster and more accurately than ever. No accuracy figure, test set, evaluation or error rate accompanies them, and nothing describes where the automated research draws state requirements from or how currency is maintained, which is the live grounding question for a product whose value depends on knowing what each jurisdiction requires this year. What is published, and is worth the credit, is an unusually plain limitation attached to the AI output itself: the filing review carries the line that it is AI-generated, may contain errors or miss issues, and that the customer should always verify their information before submitting. The published figures are operational rather than accuracy measures, running to 84.7 percent of inquiries replied to within eight hours and 18,000 annual reports filed in the last twelve months.
The grounding is documented and the accuracy is not measured. Ask SixFifty AI is described as retrieval-augmented generation over SixFifty's own Research database rather than over the open web, and every answer carries links to the Research entries it was drawn from so the reader can open them and cross-reference. The vendor says so directly in its FAQ, and contrasts it with general assistants and search engines on exactly that ground. The database behind it is written and maintained by named in-house attorneys and covers all 50 states plus a published list of localities, and the vendor states that the assistant always works against the current version of it. Two limits. The links resolve to SixFifty's own summaries of the law rather than to the statute or regulation itself, so verification stops one step short of primary authority. And no accuracy figure, test set or error rate is published anywhere, while the Terms of Use disclaim accuracy entirely. Verified 20 September 2026.
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.
A stated gate with a named actor and a fixed point in the workflow, short of the threshold. The commitment is explicit: nothing files without human approval, and the vendor's compliance specialists review every AI suggestion, verify accuracy and approve filings before they are submitted on the customer's behalf. That is more than a human-in-the-loop phrase, because it names who reviews, what they review and when it happens relative to submission. The customer-facing output carries its own instruction to verify before submitting. What is missing is the boundary. The published workbench shows states labeled AI Ready, Needs Review and Auto-Validation without explaining what routes an item into each, so the point at which the system validates something without a person is unstated. Nothing describes what happens when a review misses an error, and nothing addresses the buyer's own oversight role: the humans in this loop are the vendor's staff, and the customer sees an approved filing rather than a decision to check.
The human sits in the middle of every step, and what the system does when it is unsure is not addressed. The review surfaces are real and described: documents are produced by a question flow the customer answers rather than by a model, the result opens in an editor where it can be changed, version history tracks what moved, and legal updates arrive as suggested redlines the customer chooses to merge rather than as silent edits to a live document. Two written commitments back that up. The Terms of Use state that the AI is not intended or designed to replace or override human decision-making. The Privacy Notice goes further and bars a use outright: the AI features may not be used to make or substantially assist with any legal, financial or employment decision. That is a categorical limit, but it is a restriction placed on the customer rather than a behavior the product enforces, and nothing published describes a confidence threshold, a point at which the assistant declines, or what happens after an answer turns out to be wrong. Verified 20 September 2026.
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.
A long logo wall and anonymized quotations stand in for attributed evidence. Twenty-five organizations are displayed as customers, including DLA Piper, Wilson Sonsini, Gunderson Dettmer, Goodwin, Morgan Lewis, Cozen O'Connor, Day Pitney, Nutter, AngelList, Madrona, Lux Capital and Hercules Capital, which is a substantial claim about who buys this. None is tied to any outcome. Every testimonial is stripped of attribution and identified only by role and company type, a General Counsel at a mid-size venture-backed company, an Operations Director at a multi-state LLC operator, a Corporate Attorney at a regional law firm, so a reader cannot check a single one. The published figures are corporate aggregates rather than deployment results, running to 7,500 companies, 65,000 entities managed, 18,000 annual reports filed in the last twelve months, 100,000 lifetime orders and a 97.4 percent satisfaction score, none carrying a method or a measurement window beyond the filing figure. The band above requires a named customer or a figure joined to one, and this record joins neither.
Named customers with real detail, and no measured result. Boise State University is the strongest: a named Associate General Counsel, the only member of her legal team working on employment law, managing documents for more than 4,000 employees across almost 40 states, with the handbook and employment agreements named as what she uses. FloQast is named with its own account of rebuilding an all-US handbook in 2021 and moving to a rip-and-replace approach on the monthly updates, quoted by a named VP of Human Resources. Hatch appears with a cost comparison for new employee contracts. Customer logos run to a dozen recognizable companies and a dedicated universities page carries the Boise State story again. What is missing is the measurement: no before-and-after figure, no time saved, no method a reader could assess, and the case pages are undated on their face. The home page's claim of more than 500,000 businesses using SixFifty is published with no basis and is recorded rather than counted. Verified 20 September 2026.
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.
Substantive commitments in a current published agreement, with the privilege limb absent. Section 17 makes all Content and Entity Data the customer's confidential information by name, defining Entity Data to include company records, officer and beneficial owner details, organisational and financing documents and ownership relationships. It binds SingleFile to at least reasonable care, bars use for any purpose outside the agreement, limits access to personnel and third-party providers who need it and are under no less protective obligations, and commits to safeguards designed to protect Content and Entity Data against unauthorised access. It states plainly that SingleFile will not sell Content or Entity Data and will not use Entity Data for any party's independent commercial benefit except as usage or aggregated de-identified data. Section 17(e) adds return or destruction on request with certification. Separation is claimed at customer level, the law firms material describing segregated client workspaces in a single dashboard. What is absent is any treatment of privilege or work product, which the band above requires as its own limb, and any description of how the segregation is enforced.
The training position is specific and the confidentiality position does not exist in anything a buyer can read. On training and model use the estate is unusually direct: the model provider is named as OpenAI, user-submitted prompts are stored in a secure internal environment for quality assurance and misuse detection, those stored prompts are not used to train or improve any model and are not shared with the provider for that purpose, personal information will not be used to train generative models without consent, and the vendor states it does not use personal information for automated decision-making or profiling. Against that, the published agreement is a website terms of use with no confidentiality clause of any kind, no data processing terms, no retention or deletion commitment, and nothing on segregation between accounts, which matters because HR consultants and PEOs run many client companies through the same platform. Attorney-client privilege and work product are not mentioned. The Terms defer to a separate signed agreement that is not published. Verified 20 September 2026.
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.
A real published position, stated more than once and tied to the specific outputs. Section 4(h) is headed no legal, tax or compliance advice and provides that the entity management services and any reports, charts, alerts, calculations or other output generated through them are for convenience and informational purposes only, do not constitute legal, tax, accounting or compliance advice, are not a substitute for advice from qualified professionals, and leave the customer solely responsible for its own legal, regulatory and corporate governance compliance. Section 18(c) repeats that information provided through the services is not legal advice and is not guaranteed correct, complete or current, and section 18(d) adds that SingleFile does not guarantee that use of the services will enable compliance with applicable law. The AI-generated review carries its own instruction to verify. That is a coherent account of where the product stops. What is absent is the professional layer: no bar association, rule of professional conduct or ethics opinion is named, and nothing addresses the supervision duties of a firm that puts client entity work through the platform.
The advice line is drawn repeatedly, and the marketing spends its day walking up to it. The Terms of Use of 17 November 2025 state in capitals that information provided through the sites does not constitute formal legal advice and that use forms no attorney-client relationship, incorporating a separate legal disclaimer. The AI FAQ says the assistant provides legal information only and is not a substitute for legal advice. The pricing FAQ says the team does not serve as the customer's personal legal counsel and recommends consulting their own attorney. The Privacy Notice goes furthest, barring use of the AI features to make or substantially assist with any legal, financial or employment decision. Jurisdiction is handled seriously too, with coverage published state by state and locality by locality. What holds this short of the top is the other half of the same estate: manage compliance like an employment lawyer without being one, be your own employment law expert, law-firm-quality documents, and a page arguing the product against hiring a law firm. Nothing addresses the supervision question that raises. Verified 20 September 2026.
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.
No governance position of any kind was located. There is no responsible AI page, no principles statement, no accountable owner or function named, no pre-release testing regime, no management system and no certification such as ISO 42001, and the Intelligence page describes what the AI does without describing how it is governed. Nothing addresses uneven output. The site navigation and footer were inventoried in full on 4 September 2026 and the only policy documents published are the terms of service, the privacy policy and a cookie policy. The nearest published statement is the caveat attached to the AI-generated filing review, which is an accuracy disclosure and is graded on the accuracy row rather than counted twice here.
Positions are published; no mechanism behind them is. What exists sits in the Privacy Notice and the Terms of Use: the AI features are described as assistive technologies not designed to replace or override human decision-making, the vendor states it does not use personal information for automated decision-making or profiling, prompts are stored for quality assurance, usage monitoring and misuse detection, and the customer is told they are responsible for validating the accuracy and appropriateness of any output. That is a and responsibility disclosure rather than governance over model behavior. Nobody inside the company is named as accountable for it, nothing is published about what is tested before a change to the AI features ships, and there is no statement at all about whether output differs across jurisdictions, employer types or the protected characteristics that employment law is largely about, which is the bias question this particular product raises. The legal content itself is governed, by named attorneys; the model is not. Verified 20 September 2026.
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.
Most of the ground is covered in the agreement, with the supplier picture the notable hole. Retention and deletion are concrete: on termination SingleFile will use commercially reasonable efforts to make a file of the customer's content and filing data available on written request within sixty days, has no obligation to retain anything after sixty days, and may then delete it; section 17(e) separately provides for return or destruction of confidential information on request with certification, with retention permitted only for legal requirements and routine automated backups. Access is bounded by purpose under section 17(b), and section 17(c) commits to administrative, physical and technical safeguards and to not selling Content or Entity Data. Registered agent mail carries its own handling rule, held sixty days in secure storage and then commercially shredded. What is missing is disclosure of who else touches the data: Third-Party Providers are acknowledged repeatedly and not one is named, no subprocessor list exists, and no breach notification commitment to the customer was located in the terms. The privacy policy was not opened in this pass and is named as the limit on that last point.
One good disclosure about prompts sits inside an otherwise generic privacy notice. The good part: the Privacy Notice says what happens to what a user types into the AI, namely that prompts may be stored in a secure internal environment for quality assurance, usage monitoring and misuse detection, that they are not used to train or develop models, and that they are not shared with the model provider for that purpose. Everything around it is standard website language. Security is described as reasonable efforts and administrative, technological and physical safeguards, with no controls named. No retention period is stated for prompts, generated documents or account data, and no deletion commitment appears anywhere. There is no subprocessor list for the service, no incident response practice, no breach notification commitment and no access control description. The named third parties on the estate are analytics and advertising partners, plus OpenAI for the models, rather than a list of who holds customer content. Verified 20 September 2026.
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.
A real position with a remedy aimed at the product's actual failure mode, short of the full picture. Section 18(d) is the substantive part and is unusual in this corpus: where a filing is late or inaccurate solely because of a mistake by SingleFile or another cause within its reasonable control, SingleFile agrees to pay the customer the relevant late fees, the cost of resubmitting the filing and other out-of-pocket costs directly resulting, on supporting documentation. For a compliance filing product that is the loss that matters, and it is committed rather than disclaimed. Section 21 adds an infringement mitigation ladder ending in termination and a pro rata refund, and section 24(g) refunds prepaid unused fees where a service is discontinued. Against that, the services are otherwise as is with all warranties disclaimed, aggregate liability is capped at fees paid in the preceding twelve months, indemnity under section 20 runs one way from the customer, and liability for trial and beta features is capped at fifty dollars. Nothing warrants the output of the AI itself, and no insurance position is published.
The published position is a disclaimer, and it is wider than most. The Terms of Use of 17 November 2025 exclude liability for damages of any kind, under any legal theory, arising out of use of the sites or anything obtained through them, direct and indirect alike, and the exclusion is not backed by a fee-based cap the way most agreements are. The AI clause repeats the point on its own account: all AI is provided as is, with no warranty of any kind, and all liability relating to the AI, its output and the use of that output disclaimed. The customer is made solely responsible for reliance on AI output, including its accuracy, applicability, reasonableness and bias. Indemnity runs one way, from the customer to the vendor. Claims must be brought within one year, through binding arbitration under consumer rules with a class waiver. No indemnity, warranty or insurance is offered for the loss a buyer would actually face here, which is a document or an answer that turns out not to comply. Verified 20 September 2026.
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.
Integration is claimed at the level of a capability and no counterparty or documentation was located. The comparison table on the home page lists API access for integrations as a differentiator against traditional providers, and a developers section sits in the site navigation, so a programmatic route is asserted rather than merely implied. Section 13(c) of the terms contemplates tools that let a customer export content to third-party providers. Beyond that nothing is specified: no document management, matter management, CLM, billing or accounting system is named anywhere, no integration partner appears on any page read, and no statement describes what data moves, in which direction or on what trigger. The one concrete workflow connection published is commercial rather than technical, the law firms material offering to invoice a firm's clients directly so the firm does not front costs. The developers page was not opened in this pass and is named here as the limit and the cheapest available upgrade on this record.
No integration into the systems this work already lives in is named anywhere on the estate. For a product that generates employment documents and tracks the law behind them, the obvious connections would be an HRIS, a payroll system, a document management system or a contract repository, and none appears in the navigation, the product pages or the footer. Sharing and electronic signature are built into the platform rather than connected to anything outside it, and the described route for a finished document is to generate it, edit it in the vendor's own editor and send it for signature from there. Legal updates arrive inside the platform as suggested redlines against documents the platform itself holds. The Partnerships page is a reseller arrangement for HR consultants and PEOs rather than a technical integration, and no developer documentation or API is published. Checked the full navigation, all product pages and the footer on 20 September 2026. Verified 20 September 2026.
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.
Cloud delivery is settled and neither co-equal limb was located. The service is reached through a browser at a named application subdomain with an account, and no on-premises or self-hosted option is offered anywhere. Nothing read states whether the platform is single or multi-tenant, and no dedicated or isolated option appears; the closest is the law firms material describing segregated client workspaces, which describes a permission boundary inside one customer's account rather than the tenancy model. No region is named for storage or processing and no cloud provider is identified, with the terms acknowledging unnamed Third-Party Providers. The geographic statements published are restrictions on use rather than residency commitments: section 26(l) provides that the services are intended for visitors located within the United States and makes no representation about availability elsewhere, which says who may use the product rather than where the data sits. The privacy policy was not opened in this pass and is the surface where a residency statement would ordinarily sit.
The region is answered and the tenancy is not. The Privacy Notice states that the services are hosted in the United States and are intended for visitors located within the United States, and tells a user outside the country that using the platform means transferring their information to the US for storage and processing. It then qualifies that in the other direction: the vendor may transfer data from the US to other countries or regions in connection with storage, processing and operating the services, without naming which. Nothing is published about the tenancy model, so a buyer cannot tell whether accounts share infrastructure or sit apart, which matters most for the HR consultants and PEOs who run many client companies through one subscription. No single-tenant, private or regional option is offered, no cloud provider is named, and the model provider's processing location is not addressed. Verified 20 September 2026.
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 genuine attestation regime is claimed and nothing behind it is published. The footer of every page carries a SOC 2 Type II badge reading achieved, linked to the AICPA, and the home page comparison table lists SOC 2 Type II as an independent security audit against varies for traditional providers. That is materially better than the self-attested compliance marks common in this corpus, because a SOC 2 Type II is an examination performed by an independent firm over a defined period against a defined system boundary. None of that definition is published here: no auditing firm is named, no examination period is stated, no scope or system description is given, no report or bridge letter is offered, and there is no trust center, portal or request route anywhere on the estate. A buyer therefore cannot establish which systems were examined or when, which is the same position a badge with no scope, date or report leaves them in. No other certification is claimed. The estate was inventoried in full on 4 September 2026 and this is an absence rather than a retrieval limit.
No independent security attestation was located, and the vendor does not claim one. There is no security page and no trust center in the navigation or the footer, no SOC 2, ISO or penetration test reference in the Terms of Use or the Privacy Notice, and no badge anywhere on the estate. What the Privacy Notice offers instead is a statement of effort: reasonable efforts using administrative, technological and physical safeguards, followed by an acknowledgment that no information system can be completely secure. A buyer cannot obtain a report, a scope or an audit period, because none is offered to request. The absence is recorded rather than inferred: the navigation and footer were run to the bottom and one search for a SixFifty attestation returned nothing from the vendor's own estate. This is a record of what is published, not a finding about the vendor's actual security. Verified 20 September 2026.
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.
The vendor refers to its AI throughout and identifies nothing underneath it. Intelligence is presented as a named capability performing research, form population, structure mapping and filing review, and the marketing speaks of AI suggestions and auto-validation, but no model, version, provider or hosting arrangement is named anywhere on the estate, and no commitment to notify customers of a change was located. The terms acknowledge that Third-Party Providers may provide some or all of the services and that third-party services may be embedded, without naming one, and no subprocessor list exists. The question has real weight here because the material passing through the system includes beneficial ownership records, officer personal data and government identifiers, and a buyer cannot learn from any published source whose model reads them. This is the middle band rather than the floor because the vendor does describe a distinct AI layer as its own named component.
The provider is named in plain terms, which most of this index's records do not manage. The Privacy Notice states that all AI features in the SixFifty platform are powered by integrations with hosted third-party models provided by OpenAI, and adds a commitment that runs with it: stored prompts are not shared with the third-party model provider for training, improvement or development. The Terms of Use acknowledge separately that a customer may be engaging with AI provided by SixFifty or by third parties. What is not published is everything downstream of the name. No model or version is identified, nothing says where the model calls are processed or under what commercial terms, no retention position for the provider is stated beyond the training carve-out, and nothing commits to telling customers if the provider or the model changes, which on a single-provider architecture is the disclosure a buyer would most want. Verified 20 September 2026.
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.
The charging structure is published in the agreement, no figure appears anywhere, and the marketing claims transparency the site does not deliver. There is no pricing page in the navigation and every commercial route is a contact or demo request. What the terms do set out is real: one-time fees for filing services payable at the time of request, subscription services sold for an initial twelve-month period charged in full on purchase and billed annually on a recurring basis, cancellation requiring at least thirty days notice before renewal, state fees and related expenses charged through in addition to SingleFile's own fees, and fee changes taking effect on notice. A buyer can therefore describe the shape of the invoice before contacting the company and cannot estimate it. Two things sit against the grade rather than for it. Section 16(a) states that fees and the refund policy are communicated through onboarding and a fee schedule available on request, so the schedule exists and is gated. And the home page comparison table advertises transparent service-based pricing as a differentiator against per-entity fees, which is a transparency claim made on a site that publishes no price.
The unit is published and the number is not. The pricing page states the basis directly: pricing is set by how many employees a company has and how many states they are located in, so that a buyer pays for the footprint they actually have. It adds two useful structural facts, that all subscriptions except marketplace purchases allow unlimited users, and that access to document templates varies by subscription plan. Every route to a figure runs through a quote form; no rate, band, tier name or starting price appears anywhere, and no implementation or onboarding charge is stated. Support is described as included, with a dedicated customer success manager meeting quarterly and in-app chat. The vendor's cost argument is comparative rather than numeric, that the documents cost less than commissioning them from a law firm, and one named customer calls the price immaterial against what the firm gets. A buyer can work out how they will be charged, and not what it will come to. Verified 20 September 2026.
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.
Coverage is described with real substance across buyer type and geography, and the boundary is drawn only in part. Three audiences carry their own pages and are defined rather than listed: law firms, described as outside counsel and service providers managing client entities; investment organizations, broken out as private equity, venture capital, real estate and family offices; and corporations, addressed as in-house legal and compliance teams. Jurisdictional coverage is stated precisely and repeatedly as all fifty states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, with registered office services in five further global markets named as a separate line. Practice depth is evidenced by the service list itself, which reaches specialized corners such as special purpose entity independent director and springing member placement. One real limit is published, in the vendor's own machine-readable summary, stating that it specializes in US business entity compliance rather than international entities or general corporate legal services. What is absent is firm size, any statement of the entity volume the platform suits, and any account of where the product stops within US entity work.
Who it serves is set out by segment, and the legal coverage is documented to an unusual level of detail. Four buyer groups are named with what each gets: HR teams, consultants and PEOs serving multiple client companies, General Counsel offloading routine drafting and statutory monitoring, and startups. Public sector use is evidenced rather than claimed, through a universities page and a named state university customer. Practice coverage is employment law across all 50 states, with federal, state and local levels, and the pricing page publishes the locality coverage explicitly, naming the California, Illinois and Minnesota cities and counties covered for paid sick leave and listing the specific policies covered in San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, Westchester County, Philadelphia, Seattle and Oakland. Two adjacent product lines, privacy documents and routine business documents, are named. What is absent is any statement of company size boundaries, and a home page figure of more than 500,000 businesses with no basis behind it. Verified 20 September 2026.
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?
No located term addresses training either way, and the license that governs customer content is drawn narrowly. Section 9(c) grants SingleFile a limited, revocable, non-exclusive right over Content solely as necessary to provide the services and support, to create usage or aggregated data that does not identify the customer, any client of the customer or any individual and cannot permit reidentification, or as required by law or separately agreed in writing.
That is a closed list rather than an open improvement right, and section 4(g) reinforces it, providing that Entity Data will not be sold and will not be used for the independent commercial benefit of any party other than the customer except as usage or aggregated de-identified data. Section 17(b) separately bars use of confidential information for any purpose outside the agreement. Training, machine learning and models are named nowhere in either direction, so nothing is recorded as permitted and nothing as prohibited. The agreement search this value requires was run against the published terms dated 16 June 2026.
Training is named in the agreement, expressly permitted, and narrowed everywhere except the agreement. The Terms of Use of 17 November 2025 provide that SixFifty may use information you provide to develop, train and improve its services, business processes and AI, as otherwise permitted by those terms, with your consent, or as authorized by the Company that bought the subscription. That last route matters: the employer can give the consent on the user's behalf.
The Privacy Notice of the same date pulls two things back out. Prompts submitted to the AI features may be stored for quality assurance, usage monitoring and misuse detection, and those stored prompts are not used to train, improve or develop any model and are not shared with the model provider for such purposes. And personal information will not be used to train generative models without consent. Both narrowings are policy statements sitting against a contractual grant, which is the order that decides this value.
Prompt and Output Retention
How long does the product keep what a lawyer typed, and can that be set to zero?
A fixed end-of-relationship period is published and in-service retention is not addressed. Section 24(h) provides that on termination other than for the customer's breach, SingleFile will use commercially reasonable efforts to make a file of the customer's then-available content and related filing data available on written request within sixty days, and that it has no obligation to retain any content and may delete it once more than sixty days have passed.
Section 17(e) adds a parallel route during the relationship, requiring return or destruction of confidential information on written request with certification of destruction, subject to legal retention requirements and routine automated backups. Registered agent mail has its own stated period, held sixty days in secure storage before commercial shredding. What is not addressed is how long anything is kept while a subscription is live, including the automated research output, pre-filled form data and AI-generated filing reviews, none of which is mentioned in any retention provision.
Prompt retention is addressed head-on and never given a length. The Privacy Notice says what most estates leave out: prompts entered into the AI features may be stored, that storage is in a secure internal environment, and the reasons are quality assurance, usage monitoring and detecting misuse. It then adds the two commitments that go with it, that the stored prompts are not used to train, improve or develop any model and are not shared with the third-party model provider for those purposes.
What is missing is the period. No retention window is published for prompts, for the answers returned, or for the documents a customer generates, no deletion practice is described, and no setting is offered to a customer who wants a shorter window or none. The general retention language elsewhere in the notice covers personal information rather than product content.
Ethical Walls and Matter Segregation
Does retrieval respect the firm’s ethical walls, or can the model read across them?
Separation between clients is claimed on a product surface and no mechanism is published. The law firms material states that a firm gets segregated client workspaces inside a single dashboard, with configurable per-client access so a client can be given a view of its own entities or kept internal, which addresses the question directly for the buyer type where it matters most. Nothing describes how that separation is enforced: no tenancy model is stated, no permission or role model is documented, and no administrator guide, security whitepaper or trust portal exists where a firm could test it.
The agreement contributes an access discipline rather than a partition, section 17(b) requiring that access to confidential information be limited to personnel and third-party providers who need it for purposes consistent with the terms and who are bound by no less protective obligations. The distinction matters here because the product holds beneficial ownership and officer data for competing clients of the same firm.
Nothing published describes how one account's work is kept apart from another's. The Terms of Use cover account credentials and tell a user not to share their account, which is authentication rather than segregation, and the Privacy Notice describes security only as reasonable administrative, technological and physical safeguards. No tenancy model, no role-based access description, no statement that one customer's documents and answers are isolated from another's. The gap has a specific edge on this product, because the vendor sells to HR consultants and professional employer organizations expressly so they can create documents and policies for many client companies, and nothing says how those client workspaces are separated from each other inside one subscription. Checked the terms, the privacy notice, the consultants page and the product pages on 20 September 2026.
Third Party Request and Subpoena Notice
If someone subpoenas the vendor for a firm’s data, does the firm hear about it first?
A clear notice commitment in the confidentiality section of the published agreement, which is where this evidence belongs. Section 17(d) permits disclosure of confidential information to the extent required by law, regulation, subpoena or court or governmental order, and conditions it: to the extent legally permitted, the disclosing party gets prompt prior written notice and reasonable assistance, at its own cost, if it wishes to contest the disclosure or seek a protective order, and only the portion legally required is disclosed, with reasonable efforts to obtain confidential treatment for it.
That reaches the material at issue, because section 17(a) defines the customer's confidential information to include all Content and Entity Data. Two things keep it below the top value. There is no transparency report or published record of requests received. And section 17(c) separately permits disclosure of Content and Entity Data as described in the privacy policy, a route not conditioned on notice; the privacy policy was not opened in this pass.
Disclosure is provided for and notice is not. The Privacy Notice says SixFifty may access, preserve and disclose information where it believes doing so is required or appropriate to comply with law enforcement requests and legal process such as a court order or subpoena, to respond to requests, or to protect rights, property or safety. Nothing anywhere commits to telling the customer that such a demand has arrived, to waiting before complying, to narrowing what is handed over, or to helping the customer seek a protective order.
The Terms of Use carry no confidentiality clause at all, so the compelled-disclosure provision that usually supplies the notice commitment is absent, and the published agreement defers to a separate signed agreement that is not available to read. No transparency report 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 corpus is described by jurisdiction and no source behind it is named. The automated research capability is stated to find every filing requirement across all fifty-two US jurisdictions, including deadlines, fees and forms, and the worked example on the Intelligence page shows Delaware annual report requirements with a franchise tax due date and a flat fee. That is a real body of regulatory content the product depends on, and nothing published identifies where it comes from: no Secretary of State data feed, no commercial provider, no publisher and no licensing position appears anywhere, and no statement describes how often the requirement set is refreshed or how a customer would know it is current.
The jurisdictional enumeration is precise and repeated throughout, which is what this value records; the provenance behind it is not.
The corpus is the vendor's own and it says how it is made, without saying what it rests on. The legal process page describes four steps: best-in-class legal documents sourced from expert lawyers as the foundation, extensive research through precedent documents so the options are considered, jurisdictional and circumstantial analysis by the in-house legal team to build the question flow, and continuous monitoring of federal and state change to keep the documents current.
The Research database that the AI answers from is described the same way, as up-to-date US employment law maintained by SixFifty's in-house legal experts across all 50 states and a published list of localities. The legal team is named, with biographies. What is not stated is the licensing basis for the sourced precedent documents, or which primary sources the research entries are built from, so the chain from a statute to an answer is described in process terms rather than in citations.
Good Law Verification
Does the product tell you when the authority it just cited has been overruled?
Nothing addresses checking authority for subsequent history, and the product does not retrieve or cite primary law. Its outputs are filing requirement summaries, pre-filled forms, compliance calendars, org charts and readiness reviews, none of which cites a statute or a decision to a user. The nearest question is currency rather than citation, since state filing requirements change and the product's research capability depends on tracking them, and nothing published describes how that is verified; that gap is recorded on the accuracy row rather than forced into this value.
The value is the honest absence rather than a finding against the vendor. Searched the home page, the Intelligence page, the terms of service and the site navigation on 4 September 2026.
There is no case-law citator here, and there is a real currency mechanism doing the equivalent job for statutes and regulations. The vendor's in-house legal team monitors federal and state law changes continuously, writes the updates itself, and the platform tells a customer when a change affects a document they have already generated, offering the revised language as a redline they merge. A monthly Legal Update summary goes out by email and the changes are also recorded in the Research module, so a customer can see what moved and when.
The assistant is stated to work against the current version of the database at all times. Two limits worth naming: nothing published describes how quickly a change is reflected after it is enacted, and nothing flags a document as out of date if the customer declines the update, so currency depends on the merge being accepted.
Refusal and Uncertainty Behavior
What does the product do when the answer is not in the corpus?
No located material describes what the system does when it cannot reach a reliable answer. Two things sit close and neither is a described behavior. The AI-generated filing review carries a plain caveat that it may contain errors or miss issues and that the customer should always verify before submitting, which is a limitation notice rather than an account of how the system behaves when uncertain. And the published workbench shows filings labeled AI Ready, Needs Review and Auto-Validation, which implies a triage between machine-ready and human-required work, but the labels appear in an illustrative interface with nothing stating what routes an item into each state or what threshold governs.
No confidence score is exposed, no abstention path is described, and nothing addresses behavior where a jurisdiction's requirements cannot be established. Searched the Intelligence page, the home page, the terms and the site navigation on 4 September 2026.
Nothing published says what the assistant does when it does not know. The AI pages describe what it answers, how fast, and where the answer came from, and the FAQ addresses coverage by topic and jurisdiction, but there is no description of behavior at the edge of the database: no statement that it says so when a state or locality is not covered, no confidence signal, no abstention, and nothing about a question that falls outside employment law altogether.
The published material points the other way instead, telling the customer that accuracy is not guaranteed and that they are responsible for validating any output. That places the whole burden of detecting an uncertain answer on the reader, on a product whose coverage is explicitly uneven by locality. Checked the AI page and its FAQ, the research product page, the terms of use and the privacy notice on 20 September 2026.
Fabricated Citation Record
Does a public court record exist addressing fabricated or hallucinated legal citations in output from this product?
The AI Hallucination Cases database maintained by Damien Charlotin was searched on 4 September 2026 on the product name SingleFile and on the corporate name SingleFile Technologies. No court order, opinion or disciplinary record naming the product or the company was located. This records the state of the public record on that date and is not a finding about the product.
No record was located of this product's output being found fabricated or inaccurate in a proceeding, a regulatory action or a published account. Searches on 20 September 2026 across the vendor's estate, press and directory profiles returned nothing of the kind. The exposure is a different shape from a litigation drafting tool: the assistant answers questions about statutes and regulations rather than citing cases, and the documents are generated from templates written by attorneys, so the failure a buyer should watch for is a policy that is out of date or wrong for a jurisdiction rather than an invented authority.
Bar Guidance Alignment
Has the vendor engaged in public with the ethics opinions its buyers are bound by?
No located material engages with bar or ethics guidance at any level. No bar association, rule of professional conduct, ethics opinion or jurisdiction-specific guidance is named or referred to in general terms, and nothing addresses the professional questions the product touches for its law firm buyers, including supervision of an outside provider preparing client filings, or the responsibility that remains with counsel when a machine researches a requirement and a vendor's specialist approves the filing.
The nearest statements are advice disclaimers in sections 4(h) and 18(c) of the terms, which set the advice line and are graded on the professional responsibility row rather than counted here. Searched the terms of service, the home page, the Intelligence page and the site navigation on 4 September 2026.
Professional responsibility is engaged in general terms, four times over, and no rule or opinion is named. The Terms of Use of 17 November 2025 state in capitals that information provided through the sites does not constitute formal legal advice and that use of the sites forms no attorney-client relationship with SixFifty, incorporating a separate legal disclaimer by reference. The AI FAQ says the assistant is not a substitute for legal advice and provides legal information only, while noting it may reduce routine calls to the customer's attorney.
The pricing FAQ says the team does not serve as the customer's personal legal counsel and recommends consulting their own attorney for advice on their situation. Nothing names a rule of professional conduct, an ethics opinion or any bar guidance, and nothing engages the guidance on generative AI, which is a live question for a platform selling legal document generation to non-lawyers.
Billing and Fee Posture
Does the vendor address what happens to the bill when the work takes an hour instead of six?
Time and cost claims are published and nothing addresses the billing consequence. The marketing offers managing multi-state registrations and filings without adding headcount, an anonymized customer account that work which took days now takes hours, and a comparison table selling transparent service-based pricing against per-entity fees. None of it reaches the question. No per-matter record of AI-assisted work is offered, no guidance on fee or disclosure treatment is published, and nothing addresses what a law firm tells a client when entity work it bills for was researched by a model and executed by an outside provider.
One adjacent practice is recorded rather than credited, because it concerns who is invoiced rather than what is disclosed: SingleFile offers to bill a firm's clients directly for the services they use so the firm does not front costs, which is a pass-through billing arrangement rather than a record of AI-assisted work.
There is no lawyer's fee in this product's path. The buyer is the company itself, or an HR consultant or professional employer organization acting for its own client companies, and the subscription is an operating cost set by headcount and state footprint rather than anything billed on to a client of a law firm. The vendor's commercial argument is a substitution one, that generating a document on the platform costs less than commissioning the same document from a law firm, and one named customer puts the saving at hundreds of dollars per employment contract.
That is a claim about replacing legal spend rather than about disclosing how a fee was earned. Nothing here bears on what a client is told about machine-assisted work, because no client bill is involved.
Outside Counsel Guideline Readiness
Can a firm get this vendor through a client’s AI clause without a bespoke negotiation?
No located public material would let a firm answer a client's AI clause. No subprocessor register is published, no model or model provider is named, no cloud or hosting provider is identified, and no data processing addendum or client notification pack exists or is offered on request on the surfaces read. The terms acknowledge the gap rather than filling it, section 13(a) stating that SingleFile does or may work with Third-Party Providers of its choice to provide some or all of the services and that those providers may provide services directly to the customer, without naming any.
The one on-request artifact mentioned anywhere in the agreement is the fee schedule, which is commercial rather than a disclosure pack. The published SOC 2 Type II claim is a certification matter and is graded on that row rather than counted here, since an attestation says nothing about which providers process client content.
A buyer working through a diligence checklist would find one answer and no pack. The model provider is named, which is the one item many estates omit: all AI features run on hosted models from OpenAI. Everything else is missing. No subprocessor list for the service exists; the named third parties in the Privacy Notice are analytics and advertising partners, Google, Meta, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Salesforce, Default and Pendo, rather than the parties holding customer content.
There is no security certification, no penetration test reference, no data processing addendum, no confidentiality clause in the published agreement, no retention or deletion schedule, and nothing offered on request. Checked the terms of use, the privacy notice, the full navigation and the footer on 20 September 2026.
Court Disclosure Support
If a judge’s standing order requires an AI disclosure, can the product produce one?
No located material addresses producing a record of AI-assisted work. Nothing describes an export covering which model produced a research result, a pre-filled form or a readiness review, nothing marks any output as machine-generated once it reaches a filed document, and no disclosure template or guidance is published. Two published facts sit nearby and neither does this job, so both are recorded: the platform holds evidence logs and filing receipts, which document that a filing was made and accepted rather than how it was prepared, and section 17(e) provides for certification of destruction of confidential information, which is a record about deletion.
The gap has a specific edge here because filings prepared through the platform become public state records that a firm may later have to account for, and because the vendor's own specialists rather than the customer approve them.
Nothing published addresses disclosing the machine's involvement to anyone outside the company. The product does keep a record of a kind, in that documents carry version history and legal updates are applied as tracked redlines a customer accepts, so a firm could show how a handbook policy reached its current wording. But that record is about document changes rather than AI participation: nothing distinguishes text the assistant produced from text the attorney-written template produced, no export or format is described, and nothing addresses a tribunal, an agency or an opposing party asking how a policy was assembled.
The question is less remote than it looks, because these documents are the ones produced in employment litigation and agency charges. Checked the product pages, the terms of use and the privacy notice on 20 September 2026.
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.
- Refusal and Uncertainty Behavior
- Outside Counsel Guideline Readiness
- Court Disclosure Support
Which one fits
Choose SingleFile if
- You must keep many entities in good standing across states. SingleFile acts as registered agent in all fifty states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, scans service of process the day it arrives, and files annual reports, franchise tax filings and beneficial ownership reports.
- You want the vendor to pay if a filing goes wrong. SingleFile's terms commit it to pay late fees, resubmission costs and other direct out of pocket costs when a filing is late or inaccurate solely through its own mistake, and its compliance specialists approve every filing before submission.
- You manage entities for many clients. SingleFile gives law firms segregated client workspaces in one dashboard, holds formation documents and ownership data in a searchable vault, turns ownership into org charts that export with redaction, and can invoice clients directly.
Choose SixFifty if
- You need employment documents that follow each state you operate in. SixFifty generates handbooks, offer letters, agreements and separation paperwork through question flows its in house attorneys wrote, covering all 50 states and a published list of cities and counties.
- You want to know when the law changes a document you already use. SixFifty's legal team monitors federal, state and local change, sends a monthly summary, and offers revised language as redlines you merge into documents already generated.
- You want answers you can trace. Ask SixFifty AI answers plain language employment law questions from the vendor's attorney maintained database, links each answer to the entries it drew on, and runs on OpenAI's hosted models.
In summary
SingleFile
SingleFile, based in Seattle, keeps US business entities in good standing: it acts as registered agent in all fifty states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, files annual reports, formations, qualifications and beneficial ownership reports, and holds the entity record in a vault with a compliance calendar and org charts. Its AI, SingleFile Intelligence, mainly helps its own compliance specialists research requirements and prepare filings, which they approve before submission. The AI Legal Index grades it in the top two bands on six of fifteen capability axes. Its terms make entity data confidential and commit it to pay late fees when its own mistake causes a late or inaccurate filing. As of 4 September 2026 the index located no named model provider or price.
SixFifty
SixFifty, from SixFifty Technologies, LLC of Salt Lake City, founded in 2019 with backing from Wilson Sonsini, is an employment law compliance platform for HR teams, in house legal, HR consultants and startups. Its in house attorneys maintain an employment law database across all 50 states and many localities, write the question flows that generate handbooks and agreements, and send legal updates as redlines. Ask SixFifty AI answers questions from that database with linked sources on OpenAI models. The AI Legal Index grades it in the top two bands on eight of fifteen capability axes. It prices by employees and states with unlimited users. As of 20 September 2026 the index located no security attestation, integration or retention period.
Questions buyers ask
Are SingleFile and SixFifty the same kind of product?
No. SingleFile keeps business entities in good standing as registered agent and state filer, while SixFifty generates employment documents and tracks employment law. Both handle compliance work that sits beside the legal department, and both put AI behind a layer of human review. On the AI Legal Index SixFifty sits in the top two bands on eight of fifteen capability axes and SingleFile on six of fifteen.
Does SingleFile's AI file anything on its own?
No, by its own statement. SingleFile says nothing is filed without human approval, and its compliance specialists review every AI suggestion and approve filings before they are submitted for the customer. The filing review a customer sees carries a notice that it is AI generated, may contain errors and should be verified before submitting. What routes an item to automatic validation is not published. Graded by AI Legal Index against 15 capability axes and 12 legal signals, including privilege handling and citation accuracy, from each vendor's own published materials, verified September 27, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Does SixFifty train AI on company documents?
Its terms allow SixFifty to use information users provide to develop, train and improve its AI, with the user's consent or the employer's authorization. Its privacy notice narrows that for the assistant, stating that stored prompts are not used to train any model or shared with OpenAI for that purpose. SingleFile's terms limit use of customer content to providing the service and name no training right. Graded by AI Legal Index against 15 capability axes and 12 legal signals, including privilege handling and citation accuracy, from each vendor's own published materials, verified September 27, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
How are SingleFile and SixFifty priced?
Neither publishes a figure. SixFifty prices by how many employees a company has and how many states it operates in, with unlimited users. SingleFile's terms describe one time fees for individual filings and twelve month subscriptions billed annually, with state fees passed through, and its fee schedule is available on request. Graded by AI Legal Index against 15 capability axes and 12 legal signals, including privilege handling and citation accuracy, from each vendor's own published materials, verified September 27, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
What do SingleFile and SixFifty both leave unpublished?
An AI governance position and a record of AI use. Neither names who is accountable for its AI or describes testing before release, and neither marks which parts of a filing or document a model produced. Neither publishes a subprocessor list for customer content, and neither describes what its AI does when it cannot establish a jurisdiction's requirements. Graded by AI Legal Index against 15 capability axes and 12 legal signals, including privilege handling and citation accuracy, from each vendor's own published materials, verified September 27, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Three readings to weigh. SixFifty's terms disclaim liability of any kind for its sites and AI without a fee based cap; that is a published term. SingleFile shows a SOC 2 Type II badge with no auditor, period or scope, and names none of the providers its terms say it uses. SixFifty holds no security attestation and names no integration. SingleFile was verified on 4 September 2026 and SixFifty on 20 September 2026. Neither vendor reviewed this page.
Neither vendor paid for inclusion, placement or a grade, and neither reviewed this page before it published. Everything above comes from public material on the dates shown. How the index grades.