CON-QA: Privacy-Preserving QA using cloud LLMs in Contract Domain

Abstract

As enterprises increasingly integrate cloud-based large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Gemini into their legal document workflows, protecting sensitive contractual information - including Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and commercially sensitive clauses - has emerged as a critical challenge. In this work, we propose CON-QA, a hybrid privacy-preserving framework designed specifically for secure question answering over enterprise contracts, effectively combining local and cloud-hosted LLMs. The CON-QA framework operates through three stages: (i) semantic query decomposition and query-aware document chunk retrieval using a locally deployed LLM analysis, (ii) anonymization of detected sensitive entities via a structured one-to-many mapping scheme, ensuring semantic coherence while preventing cross-session entity inference attacks, and (iii) anonymized response generation by a cloud-based LLM, with accurate reconstruction of the original answer locally using a session-consistent many-to-one reverse mapping. To rigorously evaluate CON-QA, we introduce CUAD-QA, a corpus of 85k question-answer pairs generated over 510 real-world CUAD contract documents, encompassing simple, complex, and summarization-style queries. Empirical evaluations, complemented by detailed human assessments, confirm that CON-QA effectively maintains both privacy and utility, preserves answer quality, maintains fidelity to legal clause semantics, and significantly mitigates privacy risks, demonstrating its practical suitability for secure, enterprise-level contract documents.