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Mike: open-source legal AI
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- scosman 5mo ago2 commits, 8 hours old....
- albertgoeswoof 5mo agoAnd yet 130 stars
- m4rkuskk 5mo agoNo way they got that many stars in that little time. buy.fans must run a special right now.
- dalemhurley 5mo agoAmazing work, 130 stars is quite high for a niche product within hours!
- KingOfCoders 5mo agoNot saying they did, but buying a 100 starts is cheap.
- piker 5mo agoThe 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.
- georgespencer 5mo agoOP's Github profile looks very fishy.
- re_spond 5mo agoCool initiative. Is this fully separate from "legal Mike", the Dutch company that provides a similar solution, https://legalmike.ai/product/ https://legalmike.ai/product/ ? That may be confusing on the naming.
- iot_devs 5mo agoI thought it was named after the characters of Suits: Harvey and Mike
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- albertgoeswoof 5mo agoHow does this work with docx files? The screenshots only show pdfs?
- timdim 5mo agoLibreOffice for DOC/DOCX to PDF conversion
- albertgoeswoof 5mo agohow 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
- wps 5mo agoThis website is actually gorgeous. What do you call this style?
- anon373839 5mo agoAgreed; 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.
- NamlchakKhandro 5mo agoIt'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.
- anon373839 5mo agoHm, 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.
- rvz 5mo ago> 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.
- rib3ye 5mo agoI think you mean this https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/tree/main/plugins/frontend-design https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/tree/main/plugins/...
- elicash 5mo agoDo you just mean the Monet at the top? I know little about art, but I assume impressionism. That, plus an Anthropic-like logo.
- syntaxing 5mo agoI 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.
- alansaber 5mo agoThere are loads of them now. Great for trivial work. Not so great to highly templatise more complex matters.
- sandreas 5mo agoCool project. What a pity it's not mikefoss.com, would match the soundex of Mike Ross from suits even better ;-)
- buggy6257 5mo agoEspecially since it’s “a competitor to Harvey”
- kernalix7 5mo agoSelf-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.
- 0xbadcafebee 5mo agoRule of tech products: the nicer the splash page is, the worse the product is
- superfrank 5mo agoApple would like a word...
- dfordp11 5mo ago[dead]
- campers 5mo agoInterested 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.
- reverius42 5mo agoPresumably 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?
- debarshri 5mo agoyou 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.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- robertritz 5mo agoUnited 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.
- NikolaosC 5mo ago[dead]
- victorbjorklund 5mo agoIt’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.
- higginsniggins 5mo agoBeautiful website.
- kostarelo 5mo agoFor 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!
- dahcryn 5mo agoyeah I thought that was the USP of Legora and Harvey, so this is not the same thing at all, just surfing the brand recognition
- alansaber 5mo agoHarvey 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.
- erispoe 5mo agoHarvey doesn't have finetuned model anymore do they?
- kleiba2 5mo agoI'm so tired of having to sign up to some new service even just to try it out.
- robertritz 5mo agoSo open up your new product to every random agent and griefer on the internet? Why would you do that?
- trilogic 5mo agoWhy 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.
- oliwary 5mo agoThe name is really clever given that the character in Suits is called Mike Ross. :)
- ebipaul5194 5mo agoIs it safe to share details with AI for case points what happened when data is breached. Victims name will be reviled right?
- jcfrei 5mo agoI 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 https://github.com/lambdadevelopment/lambda-erp
- somewhatgoated 5mo agoHow will developers of this software get paid in this model?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ford 5mo agoI 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
- jcfrei 5mo agogood question - some thoughts I had: hosting the model and maybe some review process. for example: you have the customer's employees telling llms about new features and then a dedicated review cycle on the hosting side makes sure it doesnt break anything and is secure, etc.
- ford 5mo agoI'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)
- typeofhuman 5mo agoBehold the continued tradition of AI products having logos that look like buttholes.
- voidUpdate 5mo agoBecause using LLMs for legal work has never gone wrong, and LLMs have never cited completely hallucinated cases
- jbstack 5mo agoHumans make mistakes too. In many cases, more often than LLMs. Humans are still useful for doing work. I use AI extensively in my legal work. But I check every citation myself, manually. That means that I read the entirety of every case that I plan to cite in my output, and I check on Westlaw that it hasn't been overridden by a later decision. If you're just producing the AI's output verbatim, then you have only yourself to blame when things go wrong in the courtroom.
- voidUpdate 5mo agoMaybe you check every citation, but there have been several news stories recently of lawyers using LLMs and using completely fabricated cases without verifying they exist
- jbstack 5mo agoAgreed, but that's the fault of the lawyer, not the LLM.
- saidAkh 5mo ago[flagged]
- paultopia 5mo agoI'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.
- AntiUSAbah 5mo agoI find the name and presentation well chosen. For whatever reason "Mike" fits well in this legal context.
- codechicago277 5mo agoMike is Harvey’s genius mentee in “Suits”
- latortuga 5mo agoI had a chuckle at the domain name, mikeoss.com
- AntiUSAbah 5mo agoAaahhh perhaps Legora broke my connection with suits :)
- gigatree 5mo agoBesides the Suits connection?
- xrd 5mo agoIANAL, obviously! 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? I don't really think they want a more efficient result for their customers, they want a better way to get more billable hours. Adding "tech efficiency solutions" does not solve that issue at all. 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?
- piokoch 5mo agoMy guess is that capable lawyer who will be able to spot hallucination and figure out key stuff missed by AI will be satisfied to earn $500K a year, not $5M, so he will charge less. Those who charge $500/hr will simply extinct or will be a luxury used by very rich people for not particular reason, like the ones who buy other overpriced goods.
- htrp 5mo agojust a gentle reminder that most lawyers bill about 2200 to 2300 hours a year (at the top tier). Even at the crazy tier (no-life all work), lawyers generally don't exceed 3000 hours a year
- xrd 5mo agoI'm not saying a partner earns $5M, but that he is responsible for bringing that into the firm. I just don't understand how decision makers at a big firm are going to say yes to tech solutions when those solutions will kill the goose roaming their hunting grounds.
- jchurch1 5mo agoThis is complete vibe garbage. go look at the auth - it's a call to supabase. go look at the migrations - it's like 5 tables. There is a real need in the space and a real opportunity for a solution like this but this is a complete nothing burger of what exists in the underlying code. The requirements for this kind of product are extensive and complex. The shape of the data layer is complex and nuanced. Absolutely none of this is considered or implemented in the project but it sure is blowing up.
- embedding-shape 5mo agoMaybe it's just me, but seems strange to not include what countries legal system this is for, and having it prominently front and center? Since this is HN, I guess it's fair to assume it's for the US, but since English is used in more countries than the US, wouldn't it be a good idea to say outright what countries legal systems this actually understands and supports? Or is it maybe meant to be country-agnostic somehow? If so, that isn't very clear either.
- jbstack 5mo agoLegal professional here. This is NOT a replacement for proper legal AI assistants (e.g. Westlaw, in my jurisdiction). As far as I can tell, this is just a wrapper around regular LLMs i.e. nothing that you couldn't achieve yourself with the right prompting. What legal professionals actually pay for, and that is virtually impossible to replicate unfortunately, is to give the AI access to a legal database of case law. Without case law, you can't do accurate legal research, and you are inviting disaster if you're doing things like drafting statements of case or skeleton arguments. There's a reason why companies like Thomson Reuters have an oligopoly on these types of products, and can get away with charging thousands a year. They are the only ones with access to a comprehensive set of case law, and they've entrenched their position by having exclusive contracts with the law reporting companies. Without that, your model is just relying on publicly available cases that it can find on Google etc., and that's just a fraction of the full set. With that said, these types of competitor products can be useful if you're just doing simple tasks like drafting letters or reviewing contracts and you accept that you need to do the legal research separately. But again, you can get that with just ChatGPT + a good prompt.
- hn_throwaway_99 5mo ago> There's a reason why companies like Thomson Reuters have an oligopoly on these types of products, and can get away with charging thousands a year. They are the only ones with access to a comprehensive set of case law, and they've entrenched their position by having exclusive contracts with the law reporting companies. I'm not in the legal field, but can someone explain that further? I would have expected that all case law is public access. Not necessarily easy access, but when a judge writes an opinion, why on Earth would that opinion be gated behind a corporation? What am I missing?
- eagleal 5mo agoDo not know about the US, but some countries publish some type of high profile cases but _only_ after anonimization for obvious privacy reasons. To access the DB through the modern archive (well modern as new rules) you'd have to be an accredited professional passing through a few legal hardles and digital chancellor's office for each copy. It's like going to a bureaucracy^bureaucracy office. Some early companies given their initial foothold were not required these checks so they were able to get hold of bigger archives (it's also important to remember often legislation or conformity is done through consulting or lobbying done by these entrenched players). They can also build on the Data professionals themselves submit.
- nlh 5mo agoWe're in this weird in-between phase of the tech world where projects like this can now be put together in a few hours/days, but the audience of us HN folk are still trained on the idea that this is the result of months or years of work. We're going to have to re-train ourselves on what hard work looks like (and thus what should be upvoted here). I don't know whether the project's creator (@willchen96?) is a lawyer, or if they work at a law firm that helped them shape this, or how much time and effort they put into this, or whether law firms even want or need a vibe-coded open source project for their legal AI stack, but we should be considering the totality of those things when looking at new projects these days. There's a lot of red flags here.
- solarkraft 5mo agoYour comment (maybe accidentally) encodes the notion that hard work is the thing to appreciate. I don’t actually care that much about the work having been hard - I care about the result being good.
- nlh 5mo agoTotally fair point!
- PeterStuer 5mo agoLooks like a prototype thrown together in a weekend hackathon. At fist glance, flimsy wrapper around a model with a chat interface, a few prompts, and some very basic RAG. What did I miss?
- DetroitThrow 5mo agoThis doesn't have most of the important features of Harvey or Legora. This is just a vibe coded project that escaped showlim. Urgh.
- williamtrask 5mo agoSometimes I find joy in noticing the importance of comma placement: Everything the incumbents ship, in an open codebase your firm owns. vs Everything the incumbents ship in an open codebase, your firm owns.
- ajaystream 5mo ago[flagged]
- EarthAmbassador 4mo agoJust finished two years of federal litigation using only my $20 per month Chat GPT subscription. I was able to do legal research, legal strategy, draft and file briefings and legal memos including pleadings and replies. I was able to conduct discovery, including conferences with federal and district magistrates and judges, and ultimately forced settlement against a very well funded defendant with a large team of high-priced attorneys. I used Gemini and smart prompting to find relevant case law, forecast and defend against attacks and lateral counter-attacks, and proof my citations. I began litigation in 2024, when 4o was on hand to help out. If LLMs had not been availble, I would not have had a chance in court, especially given the defendant's very aggressive strategy. Given that no attorney would help me, and the profession defends itself, as Judge Posner said, as a cartel, I thank my lucky stars the technology existed. I cannot wait to see the legal profession decimated, and it should welcome AI, which can do a better job and provide better professional judgement than a human attorney ever can. I will say however, users must manage the AI model to keep it on track, to stress test assumptions, and smart custom instructions is essential.