August Launches “Personas,” the First Memory Layer Built for Law

August today announced August Personas, a memory layer purpose-built for legal work. Personas remembers what lawyers repeatedly specify, formats, style preferences, recurring facts, and applies those details only where they belong: at the client, matter, or partner/lawyer level. The feature is available today and has been in early access with select customers, who report significant gains in speed and accuracy from day one.

For the last year, August has built and tested Personas with firms to ensure it captures institutional knowledge without crossing client or matter lines. Legal practice sits within obligations around confidentiality, conflicts, and supervision, so Personas treats scope as a first principle: users decide whether a memory belongs to a client, a matter, or a partner—and the system enforces that choice. Behind the scenes, Personas encrypts data, enforces hard client- and matter-level walls, and limits access by role with approvals—with options for data residency and enterprise key management.

In internal testing with more than one hundred lawyers, user-controlled memory reduced prompt length by over 30%, improved output accuracy by more than 25% on average, and cut follow-up questions by more than twofold. Early users also found that Personas helped retain and share institutional knowledge—from a partner’s memo structure to a client’s standing instructions—so teams moved faster with fewer repetitive prompts and handoffs.

Personas converts team know-how into durable, scoped memory, ensuring a partner’s style, a client’s preferences, or a matter’s key facts are available exactly where they should be, and nowhere else. The result is faster, more consistent work that respects the ethical rules lawyers operate under.

Personas’ design reflects guidance across confidentiality, conflicts, competence, and supervision (including ABA Model Rules 1.6, 1.7/1.9, 1.1, and 5.3), translated into product behavior that is explicit and auditable. Users can see when a Persona applies, inspect or edit the underlying memory, and pause it when needed; nothing is silent or opaque.

August Personas is the first memory layer built for the legal profession—and a blueprint for other fields where ethics define the work. By tying memory to the boundaries professionals already live by (Client, Matter, Partner) and making scope, consent, and auditability visible in the product, Personas shows how ethically scoped memory can speed work and safeguard trust. The same pattern maps cleanly to healthcare, finance, and consulting, where institutional knowledge must be reusable without leaking across walls.