Disclosure: this article is written and published by DROZlegal, which competes in adjacent territory. Every claim about CourtStairs comes from three of its own pages read on October 30, 2026 (home, trust and privacy) and is attributed to them. “Not stated” means the page was silent, not that the answer is no. We did not trial the product, so we say nothing about answer quality or accuracy. This article is general information, not legal advice, and reflects publicly available information as of October 30, 2026.
What the pages say
| Question | What the pages say |
|---|---|
| What it is | AI legal research with cited answers “grounded in Canadian law,” plus meeting transcription and summaries and a phone-based assistant. The home page calls it an “Early access program: pilots live and improvements shipping steadily.” |
| Hosting | Trust page: “Data Residency: Canada” and “Core data and audit logs hosted in Canadian regions.” Privacy page: “Your core account data is hosted in Canada.” No provider or city is named on either page. |
| Processing outside Canada | Privacy page: some processing, “notably AI model providers and voice calls,” may occur in the United States or elsewhere; call audio “may be processed outside Quebec and Canada under contractual safeguards.” Countries per provider: not stated. |
| AI providers | Privacy page names “large-language-model providers such as Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic” and a voice provider, Retell. The trust page lists no subprocessors. |
| Training | “We do not use your private content (questions, documents, cases, or call recordings) to train public AI models,” and providers are “contractually barred from doing so.” It may use “aggregated or de-identified data to improve quality,” and call recordings are kept to “improve the service.” Whether that includes model training: not stated. |
| Retention | Chats, cases, meetings and calls are kept “until you delete them or up to 30 days after you close your account.” Provider-side retention: not stated. |
| Certifications | The trust page uses informal control labels, not a named audit or report. No certification body is stated, and we do not repeat the labels here. |
| Pricing | Per seat per month, as listed: Free CA$0 (15 credits), Pro CA$49.99 (150 credits), Plus CA$99.99 (350 credits), Enterprise custom. “Private deployment & data residency” is listed only under Enterprise. |
| Legal-advice disclaimer | Not stated on the home page. |
Sources, read October 30, 2026: courtstairs.com, its trust page and its privacy policy.
Five questions to put to the vendor
- Where exactly are prompts and documents processed? Hosting a database in Canada is not the same as keeping a client question in Canada. Ask which model provider handles which request, and in which country.
- Does “Data Residency: Canada” apply on the Free, Pro and Plus plans? The pricing page lists residency only for Enterprise.
- What are the model providers’ own retention terms? The vendor’s 30-day clock does not cover them.
- Is de-identified data used to improve models? Ask for the definition of “de-identified” in writing, and check it against your confidentiality duties. See our LSO generative AI guidance explainer.
- Who verifies a cited answer? Read the cited statute or decision yourself before it goes into a filing.
If the answers are specific and in writing, CourtStairs may suit a low-risk research task. If they are vague, that is the finding. For the wider field, see the seven-vendor data-location matrix and our AI legal research software comparison.