Vesence is an AI platform for law firms and other professional services businesses that runs inside Microsoft Office. The same agent works across Word, Outlook, Excel and PowerPoint, and in a web workspace that keeps files, chats and drafts together by project. It drafts and fills templates, produces redlines that keep Word formatting, checks spreadsheets against source documents, runs quality checks on slides and inboxes, and applies a firm's house style.
Every edit the agent makes lands as a tracked change the user accepts or rejects. Practice pages cover corporate, banking and finance, fund formation, dispute resolution, compliance, family law and business support. Vesence publishes its general terms, data processing agreement and a subprocessor list naming each provider, its region and the model routes it serves. Customers can choose which AI providers are enabled.
Processing runs only in the EU on Microsoft Azure. Named customers include the Nordic firms Cederquist, Snellman, Andulf and Kanter. Vesence AB is a Swedish company.
Side by side on the same 15 capability axes and 12 legal signals: where the two part company, and what neither one publishes.
Vendors in the same categories as Vesence whose graded profiles look most alike, with a line on what each product does.
Similar is not the same, so check that each one does the job you need. No vendor pays for placement.
Ordered by how closely the graded profiles match across the 15 capability axes, inside the same categories. See how each axis is graded in the methodology.
All 15 axes, graded from public sources on the date shown. Hover a grade to see what the letter means on that axis.
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.
There is no conventional product underneath. The four Office add-ins have no non-model function at all: what they do is draft, redline, reformat, cross-check and quality-check, and each of those is model work. The web workspace holds files, chats and drafts in a project, but it exists to give the agent context rather than to be a document management system, and the vendor describes the whole thing as one agent across five products.
The systems of record stay where they are, in Word, Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint and the firm's own files. Annex 1 to the data processing agreement puts it plainly from the other direction, describing the processing as machine learning algorithms processing collected text to generate responses and insights. Remove the models and nothing remains to sell.
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 acknowledged candidly but never measured. Clause 3.6 of the general terms says that, because AI is probabilistic, the services may sometimes produce inaccurate output or suggestions, and that this is not a Defect. Putting that acknowledgment in the operative agreement, rather than a footer disclaimer, is the opposite of claiming there are no hallucinations. No accuracy figure, test set, benchmark or evaluation is published.
The product's answer is checking rather than grounding: a one click check described as reviewing hundreds of errors across documents and inboxes, and cross checking spreadsheet data against source documents. Neither is a described retrieval method, and the product does not ground answers in primary law.
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.
The review step is strong, but nothing says what the agent does on its own. Every edit an agent makes lands as a tracked change in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, with accept and reject controls. The human check is the normal review mode of the application the work already lives in, not a separate approval screen. The duty to use it is in the contract. Clause 4.2 requires the customer to assess the accuracy and quality of input and output for its intended use, including through human review, and clause 10.5 repeats it.
What is not published is what the agent does unattended. Nothing says which steps finish without a person, what the agent does when uncertain, or what happens when it is wrong. The Outlook feature is described as drafting rather than sending, but that limit is not stated.
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.
Four law firms are named with their own case studies: Cederquist, Snellman, Andulf and Kanter, all Nordic, covering M&A, fund formation and full service practice. One carries a figure tied to a named person: Maja Wettergren, Managing Partner at Cederquist, is quoted as reaching 90 percent weekly usage across the firm. Several case studies are dated, with the Snellman piece dated 25 June 2026. What is missing is outcome measurement.
The one figure is an adoption rate, showing how many lawyers used the product rather than what changed in the work, and no method or basis is given. The individual case studies were not opened, so this rests on the customer index and home page only.
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.
The agreement settles training and retention, but not matter separation or privilege. Clause 7.1 says Vesence will not use Customer Data to train AI models and will not let its subcontractors do so. Annex 1 to the data processing agreement sets out retention in detail, with instantaneous processing and no storage by default. The position on model providers is detailed. Inference entities are named per route. Microsoft has approved Modified Abuse Monitoring, so prompts and completions are not stored on any production Azure OpenAI account, and OpenAI routing is limited to zero data retention endpoints.
Two gaps remain. Separation is stated at tenant level, with all customer data logically isolated per tenant, but nothing addresses separation between matters or teams within a firm. And nothing addresses privilege or work product directly.
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.
Vesence states fully in its agreement that its output is not advice. Clause 10.5 says output and materials from the services are not professional advice of any kind, naming legal, tax, accounting, financial and investment advice. It says Vesence is not an advisory firm, does not know the full context in which output will be used, and is not responsible for decisions, actions, omissions or reliance based on it. Clause 4.2 adds the customer's duty to conduct human reviews, which addresses supervision.
Two things are missing. No jurisdiction limits are stated, and no bar or ethics guidance is engaged. Vesence is Swedish and engages the EU Artificial Intelligence Act at clause 3.2 instead, which binds the supplier rather than the lawyers using it.
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.
One real governance commitment exists, in the contract rather than on a web page. Clause 3.2 of the general terms requires the services to comply with laws including the EU Artificial Intelligence Act. That is a named obligation the customer can enforce, and more than a principles page. Nothing else is published. There is no governance framework, no person or team accountable for model behavior, no testing regime before release, no ISO 42001 or similar certification, and nothing on uneven output across matter types, counterparties or groups of people. The third party audits on the security page are security assessments, a different subject.
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.
All five elements are published, current and specific. Retention is set out in Annex 1 to the data processing agreement: processing is instantaneous and no personal data is stored by default, with the sole exceptions of prompts inside customer-created agents, retained until the customer deletes them, and an optional Cloud agents feature, off unless the customer switches it on, which persists conversations and files until deleted or deactivated.
Deletion runs on customer instruction at clause 9.3, with copies destroyed unless law requires retention. Access control covers Microsoft Entra ID with token-based authentication, role-based access with least privilege, enforced multi-factor authentication, audit logging and automated session management, with customer-side administrator control of users at clause 4.5. The subprocessor list is dated 20 May 2026 and names each legal entity, its headquarters, role, processing regions and whether it is required or optional.
Incident practice is set out at clause 5 of the DPA: notice without undue delay, root cause investigation, description of the breach and affected data, and coordination on public statements and regulator notices. The one thing not published on a public page is a fixed breach notification deadline in hours.
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 buyer can read the whole allocation of loss before signing, with figures. Clause 10.2 caps each party's total liability per contract year at fifty percent of the subscription fees invoiced that year and excludes indirect damages. Clause 10.3 lifts the cap for intent and gross negligence, clause 10.4 lists six exclusions, and clause 10.6 sets claim windows of three months from awareness and six months from occurrence.
Clause 11.1 gives an intellectual property indemnity from Vesence to the customer. Clause 11.2 sets the remedies in order: get a license, replace, amend, or terminate and refund prepaid fees. Clause 11.3 makes this the sole and exclusive remedy. Warranties are real. Clause 3.2 promises professional, workmanlike service that complies with law, including the EU AI Act, and clause 6.3 warrants noninfringement to the best of Vesence's knowledge.
Vesence does not stand behind output, and says so: clause 3.6 says occasional inaccurate output is not a Defect. The fifty percent cap is lower than the common cap of a year's fees, and a buyer should price that in.
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.
The product lives inside the drafting environment rather than connecting to it, and each surface has its own page describing what it does: tracked-change generation and template filling in Word, house-style drafting and inbox-wide error checking in Outlook, spreadsheet review and cross-checking against source documents in Excel, and slide quality checks and firm formatting in PowerPoint, with distribution through Microsoft AppSource and a mobile continuation of the same workspace.
That is real depth in the four applications a professional services firm actually drafts in. What is absent is the rest of the stack a law firm runs. No document management integration is named, and iManage and NetDocuments do not appear anywhere, which matters more here than for an in-house product because the firm's matter files live in a DMS. No API, developer documentation or implementation guide is published, and nothing describes what synchronizes or what a firm must configure beyond installing the add-ins.
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.
Vesence publishes where data is processed in detail, and separates processing from storage throughout. The subprocessor list gives regions by route: Sweden Central as the main Azure region, West Europe for Static Web Apps, EU Azure OpenAI regions or DataZone deployments where Azure inference is used, and eu-central-1 in Frankfurt for the AWS Bedrock route. Annex 1 to the data processing agreement says processing happens only within the EU and EEA, and the security page repeats it.
Tenancy is stated too: all customer data is logically isolated per tenant, within a Zero Trust architecture with redundant infrastructure, automatic failover and point in time recovery. The subprocessor page even says which deployment types should not be used for EU traffic. The flip side is one region policy with no option outside the EU, so a customer that must keep data in a country outside Europe is not served. That is a disclosed limit on availability, not a gap in disclosure.
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.
SOC 2 Type II is claimed with its scope named, but little else is published. The security page describes independently audited controls for security, availability and confidentiality. It states regular third party security audits and vulnerability assessments, and invites IT and compliance teams to ask for the report. Missing: no auditor is named, no coverage period or report date is published, no penetration test summary is offered, and there is no trust center or portal.
The route to the report is an email to support, and what is needed to get it could not be established. Clause 6 of the data processing agreement gives the customer, or an auditor it appoints, a right to inspect. That helps a signed customer but gives a prospect nothing to read.
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.
Vesence names its models, providers and regions, and commits to notice of new providers. The product pages name models including GPT-5.6 Sol, GPT-5.6 Terra, GPT-5.5, Opus 5, Opus 4.8 and Gemini 3.7 Flash. A dated subprocessor list names providers as legal entities: Microsoft Ireland Operations Limited, Amazon Web Services EMEA SARL and OpenAI Ireland Ltd, each with headquarters, role and status. Regions are given per route, from Sweden Central to Frankfurt.
The routing is explained. Claude models reached through Bedrock make AWS the subprocessor, OpenAI models reached through Azure make Microsoft the subprocessor, and the customer chooses which routes are enabled. Clause 7.2 of the DPA commits to updating the list before any new subprocessor is authorized, with a ten business day objection right at 7.3. Two limits. Customers must check for changes themselves, since the DPA asks them to monitor the page with a URL tracking service.
And the home page says Vesence switches to a better model as soon as one ships, so version changes within an approved provider are not notified.
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 unit and the structure are published without the figure. Clause 5.1 puts subscription fees in an Order Form; clause 5.4 caps annual indexation at five percent; clause 5.2 allows fee changes only in proportion to documented changes in third party costs such as Microsoft Azure; clause 12.1.3 sets twelve month automatic renewals terminable on sixty days notice; clause 12.1.2 gives a right to exit within the first three months of the initial term; and section 13 provides that a Pilot is free of charge unless the Order Form says otherwise.
The usage-based unit is named rather than gestured at, with Annex 1 to the DPA describing Vesence Credits and consumption tracked at user, matter and day level. A free trial is offered from the home page. What is absent is everything above that: no pricing page, no tier names, no feature splits and no figure anywhere, and the structure sits in the agreement rather than on a commercial surface.
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.
Practice coverage is laid out in detail, but not where it stops. Seven areas each have their own page: corporate, banking and finance, fund formation, dispute resolution, compliance, family law and business support. The corporate page, for example, describes diligence across a data room and keeping defined terms and cross references consistent from term sheet to signing. What is left open is the boundary and the segment.
No firm size is named, and nothing separates what a large firm gets from a small one. No jurisdiction is stated, though the named customers are Nordic and the agreement is governed by Swedish law with Stockholm arbitration. The buyer is also broader than legal. Vesence addresses law firms, banks, investment funds and enterprises together and calls itself made for professional services. A reader cannot tell where legal capability ends and general document work begins. Nothing says what the product does not support.
The public pages on file for Vesence, with the recorded signals each one supports and the date it was last read. Open any of them and check the reading against the record.
Prompt and Output Retention, Third Party Request and Subpoena Notice
Read Sep 2, 2026
Fabricated Citation Record
Read Sep 2, 2026
Ethical Walls and Matter Segregation
Read Sep 2, 2026
Client Data in Training
Read Sep 2, 2026
Structure only, no figure published. Clause 5.1 of the general terms puts subscription fees in a signed Order Form. Clause 5.4 caps yearly indexation at five percent. Clause 5.2 allows fee changes only when Vesence's own third party costs change, such as Microsoft Azure, and the change must be documented and proportionate. Clause 12.1.3 sets twelve month automatic renewal, ended on sixty days written notice, and clause 12.1.2 lets the customer terminate within the first three months of the first term.
Section 13 makes a Pilot free unless the Order Form says otherwise. The usage unit is named: Annex 1 to the data processing agreement describes Vesence Credits, with use collected by user, matter and day and shown to the customer. A free trial is offered from the home page. No pricing page, tier names, feature split or figure appears anywhere, so no entry price is shown. Verified 2 September 2026.
Vesence shipped Desktops in its web app: every task now gets its own desktop holding that task's documents, mail and chats, kept in the layout the user left them. A user can start an agent on one desktop, move to another while it keeps working in the background, and the task lights up when the agent finishes so the user can return to review the resulting redline.
A signal records what public sources say on the date shown. It is not a grade and it is not a recommendation. Where a signal reads Not addressed, it means the index did not locate the material in public sources on that date, which is a statement about disclosure rather than about the product.
Can material a lawyer puts into this product be used to train a model?
The published terms prohibit training on customer content. Not a policy page, the agreement.
The prohibition is in the operative agreement at clause 7.1 and extends outward in the same sentence, which adds that Vesence will not permit its subcontractors to train on Customer Data either. It carries one proviso, unless explicitly agreed in writing, which is a variation clause rather than a product setting: nothing describes a configuration in which training is switched on. Annex 1 to the data processing agreement confirms the prohibition applies to the optional Cloud agents feature as well.
Two adjacent permissions are disclosed and neither reaches content. Clause 7.2 allows Vesence to collect and disclose quantitative data derived from use of the services, described as statistics about which features were used, in anonymous and aggregated form. That clause names feature usage rather than machine learning, so it does not qualify the prohibition.
How long does the product keep what a lawyer typed, and can that be set to zero?
The customer sets the retention window and no retention is an available setting.
Zero retention is the default rather than an option the customer has to find. Annex 1 to the data processing agreement states that each processing is instantaneous and no personal data is stored, and the security page adds that documents are processed in memory and never persisted beyond the session. Persistence exists but the customer switches it on: prompts inside customer-created agents are retained until the customer deletes them, and a Cloud agents feature stores conversations and uploaded files between sessions, described expressly as optional and not activated by default.
Where a customer does enable it, retention runs until the customer deletes the data, deactivates Cloud agents, stops using the service or requests removal, with storage in Vesence's Azure environment under the same no-training and tenant isolation terms. Usage data for Vesence Credits, where usage-based pricing is enabled, is retained for the term or until the customer asks for deletion.
Does retrieval respect the firm’s ethical walls, or can the model read across them?
The product maintains its own permission model, documented, requiring the firm to keep it aligned.
Vesence operates its own permission model rather than inheriting one, and documents it at the level of the tenant. The security page states logical isolation per tenant alongside role-based access control on least-privilege principles, Microsoft Entra ID token-based authentication, enforced multi-factor authentication and a Zero Trust architecture verifying every request. Clause 4.5 of the general terms puts user administration in the customer's hands, giving nominated personnel administrative privileges to manage users and access logging.
The gap matters for this buyer in particular. Vesence sells to law firms, where the question is whether one matter team can reach another's material, and nothing published addresses separation between matters, teams or users inside a single tenant. Tenant isolation answers the question between customers, not within one.
If someone subpoenas the vendor for a firm’s data, does the firm hear about it first?
Terms commit to notice where lawfully permitted. No transparency report located.
Clause 4.1(a) of the data processing agreement commits Vesence to notice before it acts. Where EU or member state law requires processing without the customer's instructions, Vesence will tell the customer before processing. The only exception is a legal ban on telling, on important grounds of public interest. Notice before, rather than after, is the stronger form. No transparency report was found, so nothing shows how many requests have been received or how they were answered.
Clause 8.3(e) of the general terms separately excludes legally compelled disclosure from the confidentiality duty without addressing notice. This finding rests on the two clauses read together.
Where does the law in this product come from, and does the vendor have the right to use it?
No located public material identifies the corpus behind the product’s answers.
The product brings no legal corpus of its own, working instead on the documents and text a firm supplies. No corpus is identified and none is claimed. Annex 1 to the DPA describes the material as text the user provides: documents, agreements, questions, answers and conversations. The product works on the firm's own files and the counterparty documents in front of it, not on a published body of law. Coverage and licensing questions about a legal corpus do not arise.
Does the product tell you when the authority it just cited has been overruled?
No located public material addresses whether authority is checked for subsequent history.
Authority checking is outside the product's scope, since Vesence works on the firm's own documents. No public material addresses subsequent history, treatment flags or citator coverage, and none is claimed. The product drafts and checks documents rather than retrieving authority, so no good law check is offered; the dispute resolution practice page describes searching and structuring case material supplied by the firm rather than researching reported decisions. The question is not addressed, and no weaker form of checking is described.
What does the product do when the answer is not in the corpus?
No located public material addresses what the product does when it cannot ground an answer.
Declining to answer is not part of how the product behaves, and its safeguard is a check after output exists. Nothing describes what the product does when it cannot ground an answer. Clause 3.6 of the general terms says the services may sometimes produce inaccurate output because AI is probabilistic, but that says errors happen, not that the system holds back. No path for declining to answer is documented, and no confidence or grounding score is shown. The one click check reviews output for errors after it is produced, which is correction, not refusal.
Does a public court record exist addressing fabricated or hallucinated legal citations in output from this product?
No court order, opinion or disciplinary record addressing fabricated or hallucinated legal citations produced by this product has been located as of the date shown. This is a statement about the public record on that one subject, not a finding about the product, and this signal is not a litigation history.
Searched the AI Hallucination Cases database maintained by Damien Charlotin, and reporting drawing on it, on 2 September 2026 on the product and corporate name Vesence and Vesence AB. No court order, opinion or disciplinary record naming the product was located. This is a statement about the public record rather than a finding about the product. Two things bound it: the vendor is Swedish with a Nordic customer base, and the database is heavily weighted to United States filings, so a European product is less likely to surface even where an incident occurred; and the product drafts and reviews documents rather than retrieving authority, so the fabricated citation exposure is structurally lower than for a research tool.
Has the vendor engaged in public with the ethics opinions its buyers are bound by?
No located public material engages with bar or ethics guidance.
Bar guidance on AI, whether American or from the Nordic markets where Vesence's customers are, has no counterpart in the product's commitments. Nothing engages with ABA Formal Opinion 512, any state bar opinion, or any bar or law society guidance in the Nordic markets where the named customers are. Vesence does commit, at clause 3.2 of the general terms, to provide the services in line with the EU Artificial Intelligence Act. That regulates the supplier, not the professional duties of the lawyers using the product.
Does the vendor address what happens to the bill when the work takes an hour instead of six?
A usable record of AI assisted work exists with no published fee guidance.
Vesence's agreement describes a per matter record of AI work. Annex 1 to the data processing agreement says that where usage based pricing is on, Vesence Credit use is collected by user, matter and day and shown to the customer in the services. Credits are spent on AI work, so a firm on usage based pricing can see which matters the AI worked on, by whom and when. Two limits. The record exists only where usage based pricing is enabled, not for every customer.
And no fee guidance is published: nothing covers how AI assisted time should be billed to a client, disclosed, or squared with an hourly rate.
Can a firm get this vendor through a client’s AI clause without a bespoke negotiation?
A subprocessor and model provider list plus client facing disclosure material is published or available without an agreement in place.
All three artifacts are published and reachable without an agreement. The subprocessor list, dated 20 May 2026, names each legal entity with its headquarters, role, processing regions and required or optional status, and it separates the core hosting subprocessor from the AI inference providers, so a firm can tell a client exactly which entities may see its content and where. The model provider position is set out route by route, including that Anthropic is not listed separately where Claude is reached through Bedrock and why.
The data processing agreement is published in full and is drafted to be forwarded, with clause 7.2 committing to update the list before authorizing any new subprocessor and clause 7.3 giving a ten business day objection right. One practical limitation belongs on the record: notification is pull rather than push, since clause 7.2 asks the customer to monitor the page using a URL tracking service.
If a judge’s standing order requires an AI disclosure, can the product produce one?
No located public material addresses court disclosure or verification certification.
A filing that must disclose AI use gets little help from the product, whose trail records edits rather than models. Nothing addresses court standing orders, AI use disclosure or certification of verification. No exportable record per document of the model used, sources retrieved and human verification is described. The product does leave a good trail in the document itself. Every agent edit is a tracked change a person accepted or rejected, and Vesence Credit use is recorded per matter where usage based pricing is on. Neither records which model produced which passage, so neither meets the need.
Every grade and every signal on this index is drawn from public sources and dated. If a record is wrong, out of date, or missing an artifact the index did not locate, send the source and it will be reviewed and the record redated. Vendors are welcome to submit documentation. Nothing on this index is for sale, including a listing, a placement, or a grade.