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Sandstone

The models drive the features Sandstone sells on: agents that read an incoming request and route it, playbooks that learn from a team's own redlines and policies with each use, and agentic workflows that redline, draft and reply to comments. Underneath is a product that would still work without them. The repository of documents, companies, people and past decisions, the matter and task tracking, the intake channels and the reporting on cycle times and capacity form a legal operations system. The vendor describes the platform in those terms, as a single system of record and an operating layer.

Grounding is claimed but never described or measured. Multi-Source Citations is listed as a feature of the agentic workflows, alongside redlining and drafting from best practices, and the platform's premise is that output rests on the organization's own precedent. Nothing goes further: no retrieval method, accuracy figure, test set, evaluation or statement on hallucination is published. The subject comes up only in a customer story, which describes redlines previously drafted with general purpose tools that produced hallucinated Word output. That frames hallucination as a problem of the tools Sandstone replaced and says nothing about its own rate.

The handoff rule is stated plainly: agents complete simple legal work and hand complex tasks to lawyers. That is a real division of labor, backed by described review surfaces, with redlines arriving as changes to accept or reject and routing sending work to a named owner. Clause 1 of the terms of service says these are self help services provided at the customer's specific direction. The boundary itself is not defined.

Nothing says what makes work simple rather than complex, no threshold or confidence condition is described, and nothing states what happens after an agent is wrong. The Google Workspace add-on's published permissions include sending mail on the user's behalf, so agents can act outward, and no oversight condition is published for that.

Five customers are named with substantive case studies rather than logos: Middesk, a business identity platform with a single in house counsel; MasterClass, whose General Counsel Kevin Yung is named; Crexi; Ocrolus; and Hypertherm, a global manufacturer. Each story describes the starting position, the problem and what the platform was deployed to do. None of the five includes a figure, so nothing is measured, and none is dated.

Several are written in the present tense, describing what a customer is consolidating or working to eliminate rather than what it achieved, which reads as deployment still in progress.

Substantive commitments are published in the agreement as well as the marketing. Clause 9.4 of the terms of service commits Sandstone to be able to identify the customer's data separately from any other data it controls, and clause 10 sets mutual confidentiality lasting five years after termination. The security page says Sandstone does not train models on customer data and that its model providers operate under zero data retention agreements, so they do not keep prompts or outputs.

The customer sets retention, and export is available. Privileged material is named but not handled. The privacy policy lists Legal Advice and Attorney-Client Privileged Content, including internal legal memos and drafts marked privileged, as a category of sensitive information it processes, and then commits to nothing specific about how it is treated. Clause 1 of the terms disclaims an attorney client relationship with Sandstone, which is a different question.

The advice line is addressed directly in the operative agreement. Clause 1 of the terms of service says Sandstone provides self help services at the customer's specific direction, is not a law firm or a substitute for an attorney, and that outputs are not legal advice. It says a licensed attorney should be consulted on accuracy or applicability, and that use creates no attorney client relationship. The same clause treats the customer as a user whether a lawyer or a business user of a shared workspace, which acknowledges that people who are not lawyers use the product.

No jurisdiction limits are stated, and nothing addresses the supervision and competence duties of the lawyers who sign off on the work. No bar or ethics guidance is cited.

Nothing published addresses governance over model behavior. There is no responsible AI page, governance framework, certification such as ISO 42001 or named owner, no account of what is tested before a model or workflow ships, and nothing on uneven output across matter types, counterparties or populations. SOC 2 Type 2 and penetration testing are security matters, and the zero data retention arrangement with model providers is data protection.

The trust center at trust.sandstone.com, hosted by Vanta, describes itself as covering advanced protections for agentic offerings without naming any.

Most of the ground is covered with specifics. The customer sets retention and can export data, and Sandstone's FAQ says plainly that it still stores what the customer puts in the product to run the service. Encryption is AES-256 at rest and TLS 1.3 in transit. Access control covers SAML single sign on, role based permissions, audit logs, session management and user lifecycle management. An in house security team monitors and responds to incidents around the clock.

A published vulnerability disclosure policy commits to acknowledge reports within 72 hours, give updates, confirm resolution and offer safe harbor for good faith research. Clause 9.5 of the terms requires the customer's prior written permission before any subcontractor processes its data, with written notice of purpose and due diligence. No subprocessor list is published anywhere.

A complete published position, and what it allocates to the customer is everything. Clause 14 gives real service warranties: enough trained personnel, reasonable efforts consistent with prevailing industry standards, provision in accordance with applicable laws, and no intentional introduction of malicious software. Clause 15 then disclaims all other warranties, states that the customer uses the services at its own risk, and records that Sandstone has no duty regarding how the customer interprets or uses the content.

Clause 16.2 runs an indemnity from the customer to Sandstone, and no indemnity runs the other way beyond the mutual confidentiality indemnity at clause 10.4. Clause 17.1 then excludes direct damages altogether rather than capping them, so the warranties at clause 14 carry no monetary remedy. No cap figure and no insurance commitment appear. Nothing here gives the customer a recourse when output is wrong.

Reach is broad, and depth is not described. Twenty integrations are named with logos, across the systems in house legal work touches: Microsoft Word, Outlook, Teams and SharePoint, Google Docs and Drive, Slack, Salesforce, Jira, Asana, ServiceNow, Zendesk, HubSpot, Workday, Coupa, Notion, Box, Dropbox, OneDrive, Zip and Ironclad. The vendor claims more than fifty in all. Ironclad matters because it is a contract lifecycle system rather than a general business tool.

A Google Workspace add-on is listed on the Marketplace with its permissions shown, which can be checked. Nothing says what synchronizes, in which direction, on what trigger, or what a customer configures, and no developer documentation, API reference or implementation guide is published.

Cloud delivery is implied, and neither tenancy nor region is stated. No region or residency option is published, and the agreement points away from one. Clause 9.6 says the customer's data will remain wherever Sandstone first places it, and the customer consents to transfer to group companies, service providers or agents who may be in other countries. The privacy policy adds that data may be stored in a foreign country whose privacy laws may be less strict than where it was collected.

No tenancy model is stated, whether multi tenant, single tenant or private. Network isolation is named as a control on the security page, but that describes segmentation, not tenancy or residency.

SOC 2 Type 2 is stated clearly and repeatedly on a security page written for the customer's security reviewer. The page also lists annual third party penetration tests, continuous automated scanning, internal assessments, and a security addendum described as aligned to SOC 2 Type 2 and available for counsel to review. No auditor is named, no coverage period or report date is published, and the page says further independent assessments are in the trust center rather than listing them. That trust center is at trust.sandstone.com, hosted by Vanta.

Sandstone refers to its model providers repeatedly and names none of them. The security page says model providers operate under zero data retention agreements, so they do not keep prompts or outputs; that is a meaningful commitment, made without saying who the providers are. No model or provider is named, no subprocessor list is published, and nothing says where inference runs. Clause 9.5 of the agreement requires the customer's prior written permission before any subcontractor processes its data, with written notice of the purpose and of the due diligence performed. That gives a customer a contractual route to learn who is in the chain, but the vendor does not publish it.

The unit and structure of charging are published, without any figure. Clause 13.2 of the terms of service says the service is a subscription, monthly or yearly at the customer's choice. Clause 13.3 says services may also be offered on a usage basis, with details at sign up and 30 days' written notice of changes. Clause 13.4 sets automatic renewal at the then current nonpromotional rate, with cancellation in the subscription management section, and 13.5 covers free trials.

A buyer can learn what is charged for and how often before contacting anyone. There is no pricing page in the navigation or footer, no tier names or feature splits, and no figure anywhere; the only commercial route is Book a Demo. The structure sits in the agreement rather than on any sales page.

The buyer is described precisely by role: General Counsel, Chief Legal Officers, associate and assistant General Counsel, practice area leads and legal operations staff at scaling companies and enterprises. The five customer stories range from a company with a single in house counsel to a global manufacturer, across technology, consumer media, commercial real estate, financial document automation and industrial manufacturing.

The boundary is left open. Practice areas are not listed, since coverage is described by workflow rather than matter type. No company size floor is stated beyond scaling, no jurisdiction or geography appears, and nothing says what the platform does not support. Law firms are implicitly out of scope but never named as such.