About

Why I built Surface

Surface is an AI document vault for Ontario lawyers, built by University of Waterloo student Moosa Khan to give solo practitioners and small firms a Canadian-hosted, LSO-compliant alternative to enterprise legal software and US-based AI tools.

Before I wrote a line of Surface, I spent a year working in legal administration. The legal work itself was demanding in the ways you would expect. What I did not expect was how much of the day vanished into something far more mundane: finding things. Which email had the letter attached. Where the signed copy ended up. What a client had actually said in a meeting six weeks earlier. The same pattern repeated across every file - hours of skilled people's time spent hunting for documents instead of practising law.

The tools that could have helped fell into two camps. On one side were six-figure enterprise platforms built for large firms, with the budgets and IT departments to match. On the other were general AI tools like ChatGPT, genuinely useful right up until you paste in a client's confidential information - at which point that data is sent to servers in the United States, exposed to the US CLOUD Act, and squarely at odds with a lawyer's duties under the Law Society of Ontario's Rules 3.1-2 (competence) and 3.3-1 (confidentiality). For anyone handling privileged material, that is not a small caveat. So Canadian data residency and LSO-aligned confidentiality became the core of Surface, not a feature bolted on later.

I'm a Software Engineering student at the University of Waterloo, and I built Surface for the practitioners caught in the middle: solo lawyers and small firms who need modern, AI-assisted tools but cannot compromise on confidentiality and cannot justify enterprise pricing. They are underserved by both ends of the market, and they are exactly the people whose trust is hardest to earn and most worth earning.

The goal is straightforward: build the compliant AI toolkit Ontario's legal professionals can actually trust. Everything Surface does - searching your documents, drafting, e-signature, client intake - runs on Canadian servers and is built to meet LSO requirements, so using better tools never means quietly lowering your standards for the people who rely on you.

If you are a lawyer trying to do good work without putting your clients' confidence at risk, I would genuinely like you to try Surface - and if something is missing or could be better, tell me. You can download Surface to start a free trial, or reach out directly. I read every message.

- Moosa Khan, Founder