One question I have about legal AI startups/products, is how do they maintain or improve upon billing practices of law firms?
Having worked with a bunch of lawyers, I know that I'm often paying $500/hr to that firm. That work is actually done by a paralegal who is being paid $40/hr, and then I'm being billed through the partner for an extra $460/hr. This is a gross oversimplification, but you get the point.
If the partner needs to bring in $5M a year, how does any addition of tech solve that?
If I'm the customer of the law firm, I would love to have a more cost efficient way to get legal advice. But, I don't understand how those incentives are matched by the partner?
Inevitably, customers will use LLMs on their own, and as people have noted, lose attorney client privilege (and often get hallucinated bad advice). There will probably be some very comical court room dramas when people try to represent themselves with an LLM on their shoulder.
Am I misunderstanding something fundamental about the legal world that will make a major law firm adopt this tech? I feel like there are some strong reasons they will universally avoid moving in this direction. Long term it will win and there will be blood on the floor, but why would any large firm adopt this stuff right now?
I believe this is the direction enterprise software is generally going. An open-source base with a very permissive license that then each company can adapt (with claude, codex, etc.) for it's own needs. It's either running it on it's own infrastructure or in hosted environment by the author. I've built a similarly extensible codebase for an ERP: https://github.com/lambdadevelopment/lambda-erp
I'm really interested in how LLMs will enable more customizable, personal software. Our PMs & Designers are writing a lot of code now, and our engineers are spending time figuring out how to make a system that's easy for PMs & designers to extend/add to.
It's not a big leap to apply that model to a company and its customers, where the company builds a well-abstracted, easily extensible base that 1) Customers can easily extend/customize for their workflows 2) Customers can self-host or run fully isolated, much easier (probably not quite there yet, but is a possible world)
> Our PMs & Designers are writing a lot of code now, and our engineers are spending time figuring out how to make a system that's easy for PMs & designers to extend/add to
Sounds like your developers are relegating themselves to being review monkeys instead of developers
I think a more realistic model is not fully open source, but apps with extremely open/flexible APIs and data models that allow arbitrary front-ends (likely with a default one provided by whoever provides the API). Kind of like Stripe's model, but the audience of "developers" is bigger since anyone can be a "developer" with Claude Code
Or maybe it will be the more established open source model where the code is free but the maintainers offer hosting/some default product
I'm a little puzzled by what this actually is supposed to be. The marketing material on this website suggests that it's meant to be used with a firm's Gemini or Claude API keys. ("A chat interface that reads your documents, cites verbatim, runs multi-step workflows, and drafts and edits contracts end-to-end. Plug in your own Claude or Gemini keys, and keep full control of the models you use.").
If that's true, how does it actually achieve anything with respect to client confidentiality or anything else? (For example, there's the claim "the assistant keeps full context across every conversation and every document." --- but isn't that a function of the model one uses, which is on Anthropic or Google? Ditto the claim "Documents never leave your perimeter. Compliance, residency, and privilege stay under your control." But this is only true if you're not piping them to Anthropic or Google...) Is this just a user interface?
It would be nice if these product webpages included an easy way to find documentation so that one could figure out what the product actually does. I can't find any obvious way to discern if it can be easily used with a local model running via ollama or something, for e.g.
These firms have enterprise relationships that dictate all of that. This is presumably just a frontend that takes the key as an input and plugs into that infrastructure.
Presumably this is an issue for the commercial competitors too, but in light of the recent court ruling in United States v. Heppner that AI chatbots can break attorney-client privilege and/or work product doctrine, what kinds of things can this be safely used for? (I would assume you want to avoid sending anything with client-confidential information in it to a service provider like OpenAI or Anthropic.)
Potentially if used with a local LLM and not a service provider, this might protect attorney-client privilege?
It’s not different from googling. If a non-lawyer googles legal advice (”how to give yourself an alibi after murdering someone”) it will not be protected by attorney-client privilege. Same if you ask OpenAI.
United States v. Heppner mentioned a public chatbot service. If a law firm (or specialized provider) offered a chatbot using their own servers and hosted the traces and other data on the law firms own servers it would almost certainly be protected. But another case would need to happen to determine that.
But that only applies for clients using the chatbot. If a lawyer is using the LLM it is definitely protected. No different if a lawyer searches something on Google or Lexis Nexis. The search itself is protected. I guess you could debate metadata but the content surely is protected.
you can have dedicated deployment per customer per case, segregating it logically. I have seen this happen in larger law firms. It could be based on groups, teams, partners etc.
For a moment I thought it was some open-source LLM trained on legal. It's not, it's a web app wrapping major LLM providers and streamlining legal workflows, uploading documents, and having the LLM providers interact with them.
Harvey made it a point to FT ChatGPT models for a year or so but they were struggling to keep up with the pace of new model deployments and quit. They never went as far as Cursor AFAIK which produced its own routers/"composer" models.
Self-hostable legal AI as open source is a useful direction in principle. Hard to tell how mature the actual implementation is though, the repo is pretty fresh and the marketing site is doing a lot of heavy lifting compared to what's in the code right now. Will be more interesting to revisit in a few weeks.
I always wondered if Justin Kan’s Atrium closed door prematurely by just 2-3 years. It would have been cool to see a “technology” driven law firm and how it would have adjusted to LLMs.
Why don´t you put a direct link that redirect users to some proprietary AI providers instead of making it look fancy. (If I ask whatever AI model will produce same outputs/forms, structured as you wish, and even locally).
To qualify as some wrapper you need to add a layer of creativity by you on top of the existing ones.
Interested to try it out!
Some feedback on the homepage there's nothing above the fold, or directly below that says its a Legal AI platform. I would like a legal AI tool, but I'm not familiar with the space don't know what Harvey or Legora are. It was only the hackernews title "Mike: open-source legal AI" that gave the context.
It's called "We just discovered Claude Code and so we think Anthropic is Amazing so everything they do is godlike and thus their design choices must also be god like. Apple is Dead, Long Live Anthropic" style.
Hm, I don't think this looks like Anthropic's design style. Anthropic is kind of doing a Chobanicore + Corporate Memphis design system that I personally find kind of creepy. But the website here just feels fresh and pleasant.
Agreed; that's a beautiful site. The main design style apart from minimalism that I notice is glassmorphism. Well, that and a very well chosen Monet to set the tone.
IANAL, but...
One question I have about legal AI startups/products, is how do they maintain or improve upon billing practices of law firms?
Having worked with a bunch of lawyers, I know that I'm often paying $500/hr to that firm. That work is actually done by a paralegal who is being paid $40/hr, and then I'm being billed through the partner for an extra $460/hr. This is a gross oversimplification, but you get the point.
If the partner needs to bring in $5M a year, how does any addition of tech solve that?
If I'm the customer of the law firm, I would love to have a more cost efficient way to get legal advice. But, I don't understand how those incentives are matched by the partner?
Inevitably, customers will use LLMs on their own, and as people have noted, lose attorney client privilege (and often get hallucinated bad advice). There will probably be some very comical court room dramas when people try to represent themselves with an LLM on their shoulder.
Am I misunderstanding something fundamental about the legal world that will make a major law firm adopt this tech? I feel like there are some strong reasons they will universally avoid moving in this direction. Long term it will win and there will be blood on the floor, but why would any large firm adopt this stuff right now?
I believe this is the direction enterprise software is generally going. An open-source base with a very permissive license that then each company can adapt (with claude, codex, etc.) for it's own needs. It's either running it on it's own infrastructure or in hosted environment by the author. I've built a similarly extensible codebase for an ERP: https://github.com/lambdadevelopment/lambda-erp
I'm really interested in how LLMs will enable more customizable, personal software. Our PMs & Designers are writing a lot of code now, and our engineers are spending time figuring out how to make a system that's easy for PMs & designers to extend/add to.
It's not a big leap to apply that model to a company and its customers, where the company builds a well-abstracted, easily extensible base that 1) Customers can easily extend/customize for their workflows 2) Customers can self-host or run fully isolated, much easier (probably not quite there yet, but is a possible world)
> Our PMs & Designers are writing a lot of code now, and our engineers are spending time figuring out how to make a system that's easy for PMs & designers to extend/add to
Sounds like your developers are relegating themselves to being review monkeys instead of developers
How will developers of this software get paid in this model?
I think a more realistic model is not fully open source, but apps with extremely open/flexible APIs and data models that allow arbitrary front-ends (likely with a default one provided by whoever provides the API). Kind of like Stripe's model, but the audience of "developers" is bigger since anyone can be a "developer" with Claude Code
Or maybe it will be the more established open source model where the code is free but the maintainers offer hosting/some default product
I'm a little puzzled by what this actually is supposed to be. The marketing material on this website suggests that it's meant to be used with a firm's Gemini or Claude API keys. ("A chat interface that reads your documents, cites verbatim, runs multi-step workflows, and drafts and edits contracts end-to-end. Plug in your own Claude or Gemini keys, and keep full control of the models you use.").
If that's true, how does it actually achieve anything with respect to client confidentiality or anything else? (For example, there's the claim "the assistant keeps full context across every conversation and every document." --- but isn't that a function of the model one uses, which is on Anthropic or Google? Ditto the claim "Documents never leave your perimeter. Compliance, residency, and privilege stay under your control." But this is only true if you're not piping them to Anthropic or Google...) Is this just a user interface?
It would be nice if these product webpages included an easy way to find documentation so that one could figure out what the product actually does. I can't find any obvious way to discern if it can be easily used with a local model running via ollama or something, for e.g.
These firms have enterprise relationships that dictate all of that. This is presumably just a frontend that takes the key as an input and plugs into that infrastructure.
The "open source" part is the wrapper on top (up to you if you believe that's meaningful here)
Presumably this is an issue for the commercial competitors too, but in light of the recent court ruling in United States v. Heppner that AI chatbots can break attorney-client privilege and/or work product doctrine, what kinds of things can this be safely used for? (I would assume you want to avoid sending anything with client-confidential information in it to a service provider like OpenAI or Anthropic.)
Potentially if used with a local LLM and not a service provider, this might protect attorney-client privilege?
It’s not different from googling. If a non-lawyer googles legal advice (”how to give yourself an alibi after murdering someone”) it will not be protected by attorney-client privilege. Same if you ask OpenAI.
This. I am telling this since the boom of generative AI and promptly being ignored.
You're right but lawyers are naturally looking for precedent to support this
Some people pay attention. I know I do. Thanks for mentioning it.
United States v. Heppner mentioned a public chatbot service. If a law firm (or specialized provider) offered a chatbot using their own servers and hosted the traces and other data on the law firms own servers it would almost certainly be protected. But another case would need to happen to determine that.
But that only applies for clients using the chatbot. If a lawyer is using the LLM it is definitely protected. No different if a lawyer searches something on Google or Lexis Nexis. The search itself is protected. I guess you could debate metadata but the content surely is protected.
you can have dedicated deployment per customer per case, segregating it logically. I have seen this happen in larger law firms. It could be based on groups, teams, partners etc.
For a moment I thought it was some open-source LLM trained on legal. It's not, it's a web app wrapping major LLM providers and streamlining legal workflows, uploading documents, and having the LLM providers interact with them.
Cool project regardless!
yeah I thought that was the USP of Legora and Harvey, so this is not the same thing at all, just surfing the brand recognition
Harvey made it a point to FT ChatGPT models for a year or so but they were struggling to keep up with the pace of new model deployments and quit. They never went as far as Cursor AFAIK which produced its own routers/"composer" models.
I find the name and presentation well chosen. For whatever reason "Mike" fits well in this legal context.
Mike is Harvey’s genius mentee in “Suits”
Besides the Suits connection?
Self-hostable legal AI as open source is a useful direction in principle. Hard to tell how mature the actual implementation is though, the repo is pretty fresh and the marketing site is doing a lot of heavy lifting compared to what's in the code right now. Will be more interesting to revisit in a few weeks.
Rule of tech products: the nicer the splash page is, the worse the product is
Apple would like a word...
I always wondered if Justin Kan’s Atrium closed door prematurely by just 2-3 years. It would have been cool to see a “technology” driven law firm and how it would have adjusted to LLMs.
There are loads of them now. Great for trivial work. Not so great to highly templatise more complex matters.
Why don´t you put a direct link that redirect users to some proprietary AI providers instead of making it look fancy. (If I ask whatever AI model will produce same outputs/forms, structured as you wish, and even locally). To qualify as some wrapper you need to add a layer of creativity by you on top of the existing ones.
Cool project. What a pity it's not mikefoss.com, would match the soundex of Mike Ross from suits even better ;-)
Cool initiative. Is this fully separate from "legal Mike", the Dutch company that provides a similar solution, https://legalmike.ai/product/ ?
That may be confusing on the naming.
I thought it was named after the characters of Suits: Harvey and Mike
2 commits, 8 hours old....
OP's Github profile looks very fishy.
And yet 130 stars
Not saying they did, but buying a 100 starts is cheap.
The post exploded on LinkedIn and the repo is likely being starred by hundreds of vibe coders. It’s legit, but may have a lower signal value.
No way they got that many stars in that little time. buy.fans must run a special right now.
Amazing work, 130 stars is quite high for a niche product within hours!
Interested to try it out! Some feedback on the homepage there's nothing above the fold, or directly below that says its a Legal AI platform. I would like a legal AI tool, but I'm not familiar with the space don't know what Harvey or Legora are. It was only the hackernews title "Mike: open-source legal AI" that gave the context.
This website is actually gorgeous. What do you call this style?
It's called "We just discovered Claude Code and so we think Anthropic is Amazing so everything they do is godlike and thus their design choices must also be god like. Apple is Dead, Long Live Anthropic" style.
Hm, I don't think this looks like Anthropic's design style. Anthropic is kind of doing a Chobanicore + Corporate Memphis design system that I personally find kind of creepy. But the website here just feels fresh and pleasant.
I think you mean this
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/tree/main/plugins/...
> Apple is Dead, Long Live Anthropic" style.
Except that the font that it is using is EB Garamond and Apple was heavily using the Garamond font in the mid-1980s to 2000s.
Given that almost everyone is copying both, it is now garbage.
Do you just mean the Monet at the top? I know little about art, but I assume impressionism.
That, plus an Anthropic-like logo.
Agreed; that's a beautiful site. The main design style apart from minimalism that I notice is glassmorphism. Well, that and a very well chosen Monet to set the tone.
The name is really clever given that the character in Suits is called Mike Ross. :)
Behold the continued tradition of AI products having logos that look like buttholes.
How does this work with docx files? The screenshots only show pdfs?
LibreOffice for DOC/DOCX to PDF conversion
how does the agent edit the docx files then? or does it convert all docx to pdf, parse the PDF into context, make edits and then save it back to docx?
laywers live in docx not pdf
Is it safe to share details with AI for case points what happened when data is breached. Victims name will be reviled right?
Beautiful website.
I'm so tired of having to sign up to some new service even just to try it out.
So open up your new product to every random agent and griefer on the internet? Why would you do that?
No, I mean just to try it out.
There are guest accounts, you know.
Because using LLMs for legal work has never gone wrong, and LLMs have never cited completely hallucinated cases