In one sentence
When deleting a case file you can now keep curated knowledge — but only by giving it a genuine new owner: the client, the opposing party or the firm-wide collective file. The default remains unchanged: “delete everything”.
The one place where human work disappeared
A fact that a lawyer has personally checked, corrected or pinned is something other than a fact a model has pulled out of a PDF. The one is raw material, the other is a work product. Until recently the platform treated both alike in exactly one place: deleting a case file took everything attached to it — including the part a human being had already taken responsibility for. For raw extraction results that is correct. For verified knowledge it was a silent loss.
Four options, and three of them you have to want
When deleting a case file there are now four logged options to choose from:
- Carry nothing over — the default. The case file disappears completely, as before.
- To the client — the verified knowledge moves across to the client and outlives the case file there.
- To the opposing party — the same for knowledge attached to the other side.
- To the firm-wide collective file — for knowledge that cannot clearly be assigned to either side.
The three transfer options only appear at all if there are curated facts in this case file and a genuine destination exists that they could move to. Where there is nothing to save, the dialogue stays as lean as before.
Why only curated knowledge moves
Only what is active and has either been verified or pinned is carried over. Raw AI facts go with the case file — that is intentional, not a gap. Otherwise deleting a case file would in practice have become a copy: the entire machine-generated stock would have survived the deletion, merely under a different name. The line is therefore drawn deliberately at the point where a human being has actively confirmed something.
For the same reason there is no “keep facts orphaned” option. Knowledge without a case file would be knowledge without assignment, without purpose and without any occasion for deletion — and that breaks the expectation a deletion under the GDPR creates; how we handle personal data is set out in the privacy policy. Here, knowledge only remains when it has a genuine new owner.
Relationships only travel along if both ends do
Facts do not stand alone, they are linked to one another. A link therefore only travels along if both endpoints are carried over. If only one side moves, the link stays behind — otherwise an edge pointing into nothing would arise at the destination, and the relationship graph would assert a connection it can no longer substantiate.
No half-deleted state
The transfer runs in full before the deletion. If it fails, the entire operation is aborted, and the message says exactly that: “The knowledge could not be carried over — NOTHING was therefore deleted.” There is no intermediate state in which the documents are gone and the knowledge is gone too.
What this expressly does not do
The most important limitation is stated in the dialogue itself, and it is uncomfortable enough to repeat here: The citations are retained as text, the associated documents are deleted along with the case file — jumping back to the original is no longer possible afterwards. A carried-over fact therefore still bears its quotation, but the source it came from is gone. Anyone who needs the chain of evidence must not delete the case file.
Also unchanged: the case file title still has to be typed out before anything is deleted — the safeguard against confusing “delete” with “close” depends on precisely that. And the function makes no statement about whether you are permitted to delete a case file at all. Retention obligations and any deletion policy the firm may have remain your decision; whether a deletion holds up in the particular case belongs on the checklist before the click.
→ The case file in the lawyer portal · Compliance & professional conduct · Security
