I'm jealous, I'd love to be able to do this. I am a small cog in a big legal machine so I am stuck with whatever tech stack my firm mandates. Outlook + Word + a bunch of incredibly unintuitive, slow, buggy and I'm sure overpriced apps for billing, version control, contact management, training, etc etc. Word has so many corporate add-ons installed that sometimes it just collapses under its own weight and crashes when I'm trying to work on a basic document.
I feel with you, as I'm in the same boat. Word and outlook are fine, teams is, well it works but I don't quite understand how displaying a couple of lines of text can possibly be so slow, but some of the other software we use has made me want to quit my job.
Our file management software works, and has all the features we need, but goddamn it's so slow and it's made me want to punch my screen so many times. And it's full of bizzare choices.
Pressing enter when editing filenames doesn't accept the filename, it just adds a new line as the filename. Copying text from the file preview works, but somehow it switches every "g" to a "q" (it seems to run OCR on a text document and then just display that???) etc
Pro tip: light that cigar with a flame thrower and use ChatGPT Work to create and update Word docs. Never open it again! It’s good at formatting tables, moving images around without the entire document exploding into shards, redlines and comments!
Pro tip: if you're a lawyer and plan to stay a lawyer, edit the Word document yourself or expect to spend 99% of the time "saved" reviewing it and making corrections when it didn't actual do what you wanted and it created a bunch of facts or law.
The first year that commercial LLMs became available, a lawyer could plausibly claim they didn't know any better that an LLM would fuck things up. Now, it's an automatic sanction. In CA, the minimum penalty is $5000. Risking your license and having a black mark that all future employers will see isn't worth the few minutes you'll save degrading your skills by outsourcing your work to a black box.
> The first year that commercial LLMs became available, a lawyer could plausibly claim they didn't know any better that an LLM would fuck things up
Is that the case? As an officer of the court, lawyers have a duty to be truthful. Putting forth an argument you didn't even read would seem to be abdicating that duty regardless of the novelty of the tool.
These law firms all using Harvey don’t know that they are giving Harvey everything they need to integrate vertically and become the Amazon for law. Then you are at their whim for every client. Also, AI doesn’t give you an edge if everyone is using the same cookie cutter solution.
You need someone willing to defend your argument in court. Someone who knows the process. Someone who knows the particular attitudes of the audience being addressed (judge, jury.)
That’s what the lawyer is for. Most simple things, especially where the law and your case are clear, can be handled by someone without a lawyer. It’s the other stuff where you need the lawyer.
Its the eb and flow of knowledge and the search for useful information with energy constraints. Decentralized until technology catches up to scoop it all back up to a tower of Babel and then it collapses and the chaff gets discarded, and it goes back to decentralized with more efficient artifacts to do the next cycle
This is funny, but the amlaw100 law firms signing up to enterprise saas have probably thought about their data protection terms, edit: equally, this is the game, and Harvey will undoubtedly be trying to maximise their metadata/data capture.
> have probably thought about their data protection terms
Maybe. In my experience working with legal tech, a) lawyers are not as resistant to the ToS click through reflex as you might think, b) data privacy is often 1 step too abstract for people without subject matter expertise to usefully reason about, so marketing phrases like “enterprise-grade encryption” or whatever are more influential than one would hope, and c) these things are often considered more technical problems than legal problems, so reliability, data preservation and lack of downtime during migration, server-level security, and more traditional concerns like that likely take center stage.
I have no idea if that’s what normally happens here, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all.
> equally, this is the game, and Harvey will undoubtedly be trying to maximise their metadata/data capture.
Yeah, and even though these firms could probably tear any given startup to shreds in court, Harvey is probably pretty happy to make that “tomorrow me’s problem,” as most American tech startups are right now.
Does Harvey train AI models on Customer Data and Content
We understand and appreciate that Customers trust Harvey with highly confidential information. Harvey does not use Customer Data or Content to train AI models, or to improve our products and services. We also do not access Customer Data or Content except (i) to provide or support the Harvey Service or (ii) to comply with the law or a binding order of a governmental body.</i>
It would be considered privileged if your lawyer told you to and you had no reason to doubt it wouldn’t be. Your lawyer would be negligent if they didn’t have a contract with Harvey.
Just like emailing your lawyer on Office365 doesn’t get rid of client attorney either.
> Harvey defines Customer Data as documents uploaded to the Service by Harvey Customers. Content includes both the queries Customers input to the Service and the corresponding outputs from Harvey. In most cases, we talk about these terms together, as Customer Data and Content.
Doesn't include thinking/reasoning blocks though.
Nonetheless, I'd imagine that Amazon'ing law is unlikely given how much experience lawyers have with drafting contracts, but who knows.
I wonder how much value you can get from just the middle layer and maybe reverse engineer the input/outputs based on success/failure from user interactions.
There is no secret sauce in what is known the ex-big law attorneys they already hire. It's the same thing known by Harvey's customers. And it's always been the case that any of Big Law clients can go anywhere cheaper. Especially as the price goes up each year.
As an aside: decoded.legal looks like an amazing resource for folks based in UK / EU that need legal w software expertise. I haven’t easily found similar folks in the US: does anyone have good recommendations for this?
Am I alone in my reaction that I want my lawyer to focus on law-ing, not pretty unique IT? What do I do if something happens to you and another lawyer or paralegal has to step in?
Businesses don't always want to have their profit sapped by overeager SaaS allegedly allowing said firm to focus on the business. Like all operating decisions, it is a cost/benefit tradeoff.
Like Intuit raising quickbook prices by 20% every few months.
I mean, the first sentence of TFA reads "..a small English law firm, focussing on Internet, telecoms, and tech law". Seems well suited to deploying 'pretty unique IT' with minimal effort.
I assume deliverables are indistinguishable from any other firm, it's not like they are submitting a brief in OpenDocument Format.
I personally would find my lawyer working on projects and blogging about stuff related to his legal domain to be a good thing. This is no different than a constitutional lawyer writing a blog about some constitutional matter going on in current events.
I also want my lawyer to focus on lawyering, not dealing with Microsoft contracts, trying to keep confidential data out of copilot, dealing with proprietary formats, etc.
At the end of the day, every firm needs some form of IT. Above a certain scale you are hiring IT help to manage it anyway, might as well use free software where you can over MS. It’s not as if managing MS for a large org is particularly easy.
I doubt this blog post is intended for the benefit of his clients.
That said, as someone who is used to Linux and FOSS in my personal life but forced to use a typical corporate tech stack at work, I feel the tech I use at work is a hindrance more than anything and I would be more productive with the kind of stack the author describes.
Upvoting because it's an interesting statement, and also probably wrong?
As a techy person with a law degree that doesn't really practice any more, the "silos" of what each lawyer thinks is and isn't a "must have" is interesting, as well as the huge differences in rates and types of tech adoption; a huge factor here is probably administrative assistants who do a lot of heavy lifting.
you're explaining a clerical issue that lost a client a case caused by compatibility issue to other lawyers in a bar hgearing because your client sent you a document in a format that does not respect user freedom
they ask how you've managed to avoid this problem so far, and it turns out that you've been battling it nonstop for years
How do you justify that as a lawyer on the basis of "user freedom"?
Honestly your best defense is probably true ignorance or bad decision making that led you to choose something that, to non-developers, really only works as a way to save $100/yr or do some crazy new thing that didn't work. But that's still pretty bad.
Even if you're some crazy unix hacker wizard who for some reason works as a lawyer, how does never using Word help your client?
why does it matter for a word doc. At the end of the day, what matters is the doc file you save. that's your artifact. Weather you use a cli tool, agent or ms word to create that file doesn't matter as long as the content is correct and the person who receives the file can open it.
Because Wordcraft is faster and more stable than Word. Word rarely crashes, but it does freeze. Wordcraft is freezing about 1/2 as often as Word. For the daily grinding out docs, it's way more viable than Openoffice.
But mostly, because having a workflow entirely dependent on a single vendor seems like something to avoid if possible.
The last formatting bug I encountered was last week. Claude identified, patched, and pushed in 10 minutes.
It doesn't do VBA. However, porting VBA to WC macros is trivial for llms.
Why become hostage to a multibillion conglomerate for "editing text"? It's asinine what people are using Word for. If engineering types need special syntax handling I get it, but lawyers.. accountants.. my god man, plain text is fine with some semi-fancy markup a la markdown renderers these days. Some tables, some red lines, some fonts.. It's trivial. It was not in the 80s but it is now.
I haven’t used many of these vibe coded clones, but the ones I have used have all been significantly lacking in depth compared to what they are ripping off. I’m sure wordcraft works fine for typing a high school 5 paragraph essay (although, I don’t think high school students still do that). I would be shocked if it can handle revision history, complex redline edits, legal brief formatting, etc.
I just tried it out of curiosity. It doesn't exist in their web suite, when I tried to run it using their launcher it failed to install and crashed the installer.
I can't directly refute your claims, but I can say that a program that won't install can't do any of those things for me.
I don't care if my lawyer doesn't use word. I do care if they use a buggy, vibe coded that is still in Alpha. Word processing is a solved problem. Free (beer or speech) word processing is a solved problem. Word compatible free word processing is a solved problem. Don't put my case in jeopardy because you want to use untested, alpha software.
It's definitely not categorically malpractice to not use Word. Depends entirely on the situation. If a court demands docx and you file an rtf, or you refuse to read a client's redlines because they're in Word, sure, that could be malpractice.
The only proprietary software that I think _might_ be malpractice not to use is a legal research service with a capable citator, like Westlaw or LexisNexis. If you rely on a case that was overruled, you can't defend a malpractice suit by saying, "I didn't want to pay for the software."
I hear CourtListener (a free legal research tool) is working on a citator--hopefully it's competitive with the paid services.
It's a certainty that your clients and colleagues will be using Word to work with you and the rest of the legal system, and some files will use docx.
It would be pretty bizarre to turn down work or make things harder for people outside your firm because you refuse to use Microsoft Word.
You could use another tool that handles .docx but if it's not directly compatible with Word you're almost guaranteed to run into compatibility issues or maybe serious errors. If you don't even touch Word at all, then the first person to run into them would might be your client. Do you not just immediately decide that it's not worth saving $100/yr to eliminate that kind of risk? If not then you have to say something like
"Actually, it's more important that software be free and open source than that thing you pay me to do for you, that costs about two minutes of billable hours, and which every other lawyer uses?"
I don't think someone with that kind of decision making should be a lawyer, not necessarily because it's wrong but because even if it's true, imagine explaining to the bar association that Arch started opting you into nightly builds?
Obviously there should be lawyers trying to use open source software, but I can't believe a real person would never run into compatibility issues. Richard stallman as a lawyer explaining that he can't open files sent in formats that do not respect user freedom is such a good bit
>I hear CourtListener (a free legal research tool) is working on a citator--hopefully it's competitive with the paid services.
Even if. it's not just the citation graph. No headnotes. No restatements. They're about 100 light years away from being close to usable, even if the citator was complete and comparable.
This must have been intended as hyperbole. It is true, in some legal practice areas, non-use of Word has been highly impractical or even impossible for a long time, mainly because in the mainstream legal profession generally Word quickly established a chokehold by the late 1990s.
Some courts expect Word format. I haven't been close to litigation in ages so I don't know how common a thing this is, but here's an example of an apparent "Word only" federal court: https://www.caed.uscourts.gov/caednew/index.cfm/attorney-inf... . So sure, in a hypothetical where a lawyer stubbornly refused to use Word in the context of a filing in that court, you can imagine consequences arising to the level of malpractice, but I don't think that's what they had in mind.
A more familiar issue to me (and I'm guessing what that speaker was thinking of) is that if you're negotiating an agreement with some other party, and they are using Word (as they most likely will be), it is going to be highly inconvenient at best to insist on using some alternative tool.
Red Hat's in house legal team is, er, was not a law firm of course, but ages ago Red Hat attempted to have as many 'back-office' staff use RHEL as possible, with few exceptions related to what was necessary for regulatory purposes. This extended to Red Hat's legal team, which attempted valiantly for a while to use OpenOffice (as was, and I suppose more specifically the RHEL packaging of the go-oo fork in those days) for all document-related purposes, including negotiating agreements with outside parties who were using Word. This proved to be impractical for at least the subset of the legal team that did that sort of work as their daily bread and butter, and eventually they got access to Word on Windows on VMware. Later on, it became possible for Red Hat lawyers to use OS X and Windows with Word, so the issue went away.
I'm surprised that courts do not mostly/exclusively want PDF.
Also, IIRC one of Wordperfect's last strongholds was in the legal sector, as they had so much invested in Wordperfect templates and (I'm told) its citation management fucntionality was good.
I sure hope so. The idea that if you want to work in [profession x] you have no choice but to pay the [megacorp y] tax is obscene, and should be fought against even as we acknowledge that it is often the reality.
We've come a long way since the days of Brandeis and the trust busters.
Geez, people here really struggle with the law. You have to read that whole thing.
That's only for documents that are required to be "submitted to the court in word processing format." It's an unusual circumstance when that is the case. 99.999% of all court documents are submitted as PDFs.
Yeah but they said they use “Word” documents when exchanging with other lawyers, etc. So I take that to mean they are exporting .docx with LibreOffice. I’m not sure I see what would be the issue with that?
> I had wondered if I would need to switch to Word for some documents but, so far, no.
> I don’t know how many “Word documents” I’ve worked on in the last year - low hundreds, at a guess - but there has been no problem.
> Even a document with hundreds of tracked changes and comments, and multiple contributors across multiple organisations - an unusual situation for me, anyway - was fine.
> (Admittedly, it took me a while how to deal with LibreOffice Writer’s tracked changes function and comments, but that was simply user error.)
I would worry about using Postfix for a business. I've been running my own mail server for 25+ years using Postfix under the same domain, and once about 7-8 years ago incoming messages from GMail bounced because Google tightened its rules for server encryption. I added the DMARC or whatever else was required, and it all worked again, but to do this as a business, you have to regularly test sending e-mails from accounts with the big providers who make all the unwritten rules.
I set up a small law office with GMail for their domain, for this reason, and have a script ready to run a Postfix server if Google fails.
This is all really cool and inspiring. It makes me think “i want that!” but then I pause and think about it and the aggregate seems exhausting to maintain.
Are you actually able to get anything done at speed and scale with all of this FOSS and the finagling and wiring etc. it takes to maintain?
Does it make you a more effective and successful lawyer?
Does it increase/decrease the amount of time you have with friends and family?
It seems like this is a bit of a hobby, a bit of a marketing statement given the law area, and requires a very technically savvy lawyer to operate this system.
I think it'd be interesting for a firm to try to run without traditional software. Like the computer boots, you get a floating orb and you tell it stuff, it remembers, it stores it in an optimal format, it is capable of receiving, triaging, and sending synchronous or asynchronous communications externally or around the organization. It knows how to build just-in-time tools and can recall any information, displaying it in the most helpful format.
It's not clear what 'work' those orbs would be doing because a lot of 'work' exists because of current frictions due to bad tools or some arbitrage around a lack of trust or expertise. For example with contract redlines, if I just tell my AI what is important to me, and you tell yours, they can collaborate on a shared agreement that is essentially guaranteed to be fair (modulo trusting the AI). No emailing word documents back and forth, no ambiguity of obligations, no hiding misleading terms, etc.
My biggest concern is having only one DevOps person. What happens if you get sick or are unavailable? You still need someone with around 5 years of DevOps experience. Being understaffed at critical moments can easily lead to losing customers.
Also, how many employees and customers do you have? Do major clients, such as corporations or banks, require security certifications or specific processes?
I think customers need to feel they can trust a company that is large enough and capable of taking responsibility, rather than a one-person company.
That's a weird comment. It's a small business with a static website that mainly runs over email/phone/signal. I'm not sure (speaking as a devops person with decades of experience) what a devops person would even do there; does a freelance artist need devops? Or a cat cafe?
You then ask how many employees they have, suggesting it's a one person company...I mean, it's right there on the website. It's Neil and Sandra, a husband and wife team. https://decoded.legal/diversity/ . They've been running successfully for five years, suggesting your concerns are unfounded.
This is common with solo practitioners. Sometimes you have to take weeks, months off, or suspend your practice. The answer would be referrals/your network, but obviously, in bad circumstances you can't always offer a soft landing to your clients.
The law firm that can never make it to court because they spend 80% of their time doing DevOps things like upgrading SW, patching vulns and exporting documents in the right format for discovery.
For email I would strongly recommend looking into also running rspamd , it integrates very well with postfix and cuts down on a vast quantity of incoming spam.
My gf is a lawyer with a single-person office and the only software she uses is a word document (advanced from an A4 paper) to write outstanding issues, next appointments, advances etc. As can be understood not very technical.
Could you recommend me a way to gently introduce some kind of software/automation to her office?
Give her Claude and show her how to ask Claude how to do things. My wife uses it to write mini scripts now for all the annoying repetitive tasks she has. Zero programming background.
As a lawyer who vibe codes using Claude code all of the time and believes it's the highest value case... I'm going to disagree with this suggestion.
If she never uses ai at work at all, start with something dead simple:
-do research with it
-put a large corpus of documents into LLM context and ask questions of it
AFAIK no state level organisation has sanctioned someone for this. You can opt-out of data collection, which some practitioners think is good enough to satisfying their professional liability- risk tolerance depends on the individual (this is not advice, just my observation!)
A large corpus of documents does not have to mean privileged info. Put all of the public documents from a case in there and ask it about a judges reasoning.
Honestly that wouldn’t be a terrible product: Pull in all of a judges written judgements or stated logic about their rulings and preemptively craft your case around their biases.
MD is pretty simple, but why would a lawyer want to learn a limited,presentation-oriented syntax? And a wiki? Both of these decisions would make red lining a new, unpleasant adventure, something every lawyer I know does A LOT.
It's not so gentle, but lawyers in the US have told me that their malpractice insurance requires them to have practice management software - calendar, document management, case management, customer management, billing and accounting.
Find a web-hosted practice management system, start with the piece she finds most valuable and easy to use (maybe a calendar?).
My girlfriend is also a lawyer with a single-person office (well a part-time legal assistant).
I’d try to learn a bit more about her workflow. My partner has a contract with the state, cyber insurance, and has some records retention requirements which inform a lot of the technology. As an example discovery for some cases can run 100gbs and require 10 years of retention. She has to file a monthly report with very specific data requirements and we’re working on the extract out of the matter management because it doesn’t support an effective-as-of for the various fields which is needed.
I’ve found a good place to start is with how email and calendaring is used and implementing more security. Presuming she’s using hosted email (m365/gmail) or similar.
Maybe start with her calendar especially if she’s doing it on paper even more so if she’s using that to drive any client contact.
It's her system. She uses it for a reason that may not make sense to you but makes perfect sense to her.
If you want to ease her into automation, either a calendaring system or a practice management suite like Clio or Zola. Leave AI and more technical solutions for much, much later.
I have been extensively using LibreOffice in my court drafting, research, report writings and it has helped..
Over the years i have seen the progression of software, bugs I reported having been fixed in 2-3-5 releases always makes me happy.
People hate it for reasons that feel wrong.
They want a "mirror" of word, that's... Not going to happen, at least not in the UX department.
For compatibility, it is being improved iteratively.
I am on the fence for wordcraft by storytold for now.
That said, I do self host email using mailinabox.
I do use KDE neon for my own machine.
I have to use some business software which are windows based so I have to use that.. I just rdp into the machine and it works.
I don't use collaborative software because most of the time it's just me.
This is a fun blog idea, I'm going to steal it. I've been running a software engineering co-op for the last 5 years using only self hosted and FOSS software (outside of our email server and discord).
The bulk of it is run through ERPnext, which handles timesheets, invoices (client and member side), and accounting. We built some modules for ERPnext to make that as automated as possible, some of which I've finally got together this week: https://github.com/508-dev/erp_ruleshttps://github.com/508-dev/books_health I used to use Crater for accounting, but it could only handle very basic accounting, so I switched to GnuCash, which I found too complicated but also too difficult to collaborate with, thus ERPnext.
We run member application management and BD pipeline through EspoCRM. Outline for wiki. Authentik for identity provider. Keila for newsletter emails. Vaultwarden for password management. Docuseal in place of Docusign. Nextcloud for basically all Google Drive / Docs / Calendar features, though it's quite slow in comparison. Coolify as a generic PAAS for MVPs or random member projects. Cal.com for appointments. Oh, to be fair, I still just route those to Google Meet.
I wish we could get a self hosted Discord alternative, however I found Matrix to be too unintuitive of a UX, and member participation was plummeting.
I've given a couple talks on self hosting and FOSS. Especially in the age of LLMs, I think it's very viable to move away from expensive SaaS. Just this week I had claude adding a ton of automations to our ERP, which probably isn't as possible for proprietary SaaS. Being able to straight up clone the codebase down and read/modify it directly makes for some interesting possibilities that we can then just as easily deploy ourselves since we self host.
Using VPSs
To the lawyers, they can use software being available for free both as in for $0 and freedom as in libre (including choosing to not pay for it and not being obligated to pay developers at all) while their service of legal advice is not free and always costs money.
Guess who wins here? (Hint: It isn't the volunteer open source developer)
Plenty of lawyers offer "pro bono" services to non-profits, indigents, and others who can't afford their services. At most firms, pro bono hours are required.
As a percentage of their respective industries, more lawyers engage in some pro bono/charity work than programmers.
But it's not worth too much to deal with crappy proprietary software?
I know a lot of open source software is a pain in the ass, but so is a lot of proprietary software. You use what you know, understand, and can support.
> "I'm a mechanic and I hand forge new spanners every time I work on a car."
This is a bad analogy. It's not like he's writing new software every time he has to do something. It's more like using tools that your machinist friends built.
I'm jealous, I'd love to be able to do this. I am a small cog in a big legal machine so I am stuck with whatever tech stack my firm mandates. Outlook + Word + a bunch of incredibly unintuitive, slow, buggy and I'm sure overpriced apps for billing, version control, contact management, training, etc etc. Word has so many corporate add-ons installed that sometimes it just collapses under its own weight and crashes when I'm trying to work on a basic document.
I feel with you, as I'm in the same boat. Word and outlook are fine, teams is, well it works but I don't quite understand how displaying a couple of lines of text can possibly be so slow, but some of the other software we use has made me want to quit my job.
Our file management software works, and has all the features we need, but goddamn it's so slow and it's made me want to punch my screen so many times. And it's full of bizzare choices.
Pressing enter when editing filenames doesn't accept the filename, it just adds a new line as the filename. Copying text from the file preview works, but somehow it switches every "g" to a "q" (it seems to run OCR on a text document and then just display that???) etc
Pro tip: light that cigar with a flame thrower and use ChatGPT Work to create and update Word docs. Never open it again! It’s good at formatting tables, moving images around without the entire document exploding into shards, redlines and comments!
Pro tip: if you're a lawyer and plan to stay a lawyer, edit the Word document yourself or expect to spend 99% of the time "saved" reviewing it and making corrections when it didn't actual do what you wanted and it created a bunch of facts or law.
The first year that commercial LLMs became available, a lawyer could plausibly claim they didn't know any better that an LLM would fuck things up. Now, it's an automatic sanction. In CA, the minimum penalty is $5000. Risking your license and having a black mark that all future employers will see isn't worth the few minutes you'll save degrading your skills by outsourcing your work to a black box.
> The first year that commercial LLMs became available, a lawyer could plausibly claim they didn't know any better that an LLM would fuck things up
Is that the case? As an officer of the court, lawyers have a duty to be truthful. Putting forth an argument you didn't even read would seem to be abdicating that duty regardless of the novelty of the tool.
In 2023 we didn't know that LLMs would make things up even if you asked them to limit themselves to actual facts/laws/etc.
These law firms all using Harvey don’t know that they are giving Harvey everything they need to integrate vertically and become the Amazon for law. Then you are at their whim for every client. Also, AI doesn’t give you an edge if everyone is using the same cookie cutter solution.
We use Carta for work and that is my fear with them.
I know at least 3 people who’ve worked there. Your fears are correct
What is their plan?
They exited secondaries in 2024 after blowback from using everyone’s data. But I could see them trying again soon.
And… what’s the lawyer for if the software can solve the issue?
You need someone willing to defend your argument in court. Someone who knows the process. Someone who knows the particular attitudes of the audience being addressed (judge, jury.)
That’s what the lawyer is for. Most simple things, especially where the law and your case are clear, can be handled by someone without a lawyer. It’s the other stuff where you need the lawyer.
It is kinda unique to the US were presentation, performance and using emotions matter a lot, instead of cold, neutral logic and arguments.
The software doesn't solve the issue, they sell services to lawyers. They don't sell legal services to the public.
Just like how openAI and Anthropic have suddenly started consulting firms, right after obtaining everyone’s IP and secret documents.
Its the eb and flow of knowledge and the search for useful information with energy constraints. Decentralized until technology catches up to scoop it all back up to a tower of Babel and then it collapses and the chaff gets discarded, and it goes back to decentralized with more efficient artifacts to do the next cycle
This is funny, but the amlaw100 law firms signing up to enterprise saas have probably thought about their data protection terms, edit: equally, this is the game, and Harvey will undoubtedly be trying to maximise their metadata/data capture.
> have probably thought about their data protection terms
Maybe. In my experience working with legal tech, a) lawyers are not as resistant to the ToS click through reflex as you might think, b) data privacy is often 1 step too abstract for people without subject matter expertise to usefully reason about, so marketing phrases like “enterprise-grade encryption” or whatever are more influential than one would hope, and c) these things are often considered more technical problems than legal problems, so reliability, data preservation and lack of downtime during migration, server-level security, and more traditional concerns like that likely take center stage.
I have no idea if that’s what normally happens here, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all.
> equally, this is the game, and Harvey will undoubtedly be trying to maximise their metadata/data capture.
Yeah, and even though these firms could probably tear any given startup to shreds in court, Harvey is probably pretty happy to make that “tomorrow me’s problem,” as most American tech startups are right now.
https://www.harvey.ai/legal/harvey-privacy-center
Does Harvey train AI models on Customer Data and Content
We understand and appreciate that Customers trust Harvey with highly confidential information. Harvey does not use Customer Data or Content to train AI models, or to improve our products and services. We also do not access Customer Data or Content except (i) to provide or support the Harvey Service or (ii) to comply with the law or a binding order of a governmental body.</i>
... at this time.
Also if you give your lawyer a document, that's privileged. If you upload it to Harvey, who knows?
It would be considered privileged if your lawyer told you to and you had no reason to doubt it wouldn’t be. Your lawyer would be negligent if they didn’t have a contract with Harvey.
Just like emailing your lawyer on Office365 doesn’t get rid of client attorney either.
Yeah but it’s the data breaches that’s worrying right? They obviously store people’s data. They’ll get breached eventually they all do.
Even during a data breach, leaked legal data can’t be used against you in most situations.
> What is Customer Data and Content?
> Harvey defines Customer Data as documents uploaded to the Service by Harvey Customers. Content includes both the queries Customers input to the Service and the corresponding outputs from Harvey. In most cases, we talk about these terms together, as Customer Data and Content.
Doesn't include thinking/reasoning blocks though.
Nonetheless, I'd imagine that Amazon'ing law is unlikely given how much experience lawyers have with drafting contracts, but who knows.
Thank you!
I suspected it wasn't as broad.
I wonder how much value you can get from just the middle layer and maybe reverse engineer the input/outputs based on success/failure from user interactions.
Well at least you have Legora as well.
There is no secret sauce in what is known the ex-big law attorneys they already hire. It's the same thing known by Harvey's customers. And it's always been the case that any of Big Law clients can go anywhere cheaper. Especially as the price goes up each year.
As an aside: decoded.legal looks like an amazing resource for folks based in UK / EU that need legal w software expertise. I haven’t easily found similar folks in the US: does anyone have good recommendations for this?
Neil is very active in the Fediverse on a variety of tech and non tech topics (Airsoft) and appalling jokes.
Neil seems to be one of the good guys too
Am I alone in my reaction that I want my lawyer to focus on law-ing, not pretty unique IT? What do I do if something happens to you and another lawyer or paralegal has to step in?
Businesses don't always want to have their profit sapped by overeager SaaS allegedly allowing said firm to focus on the business. Like all operating decisions, it is a cost/benefit tradeoff.
Like Intuit raising quickbook prices by 20% every few months.
+1, too many SaaS’ sapping profit.
Intuit is killing me. I am genuinely looking for another solution that won’t break my CPAs brain.
Also the desktop vs online stuff is so annoying since they don’t have 1:1 feature parity.
GnuCash? Ledger or another plain-text tool?
I mean, the first sentence of TFA reads "..a small English law firm, focussing on Internet, telecoms, and tech law". Seems well suited to deploying 'pretty unique IT' with minimal effort.
I assume deliverables are indistinguishable from any other firm, it's not like they are submitting a brief in OpenDocument Format.
> Am I alone in my reaction
You are.
I personally would find my lawyer working on projects and blogging about stuff related to his legal domain to be a good thing. This is no different than a constitutional lawyer writing a blog about some constitutional matter going on in current events.
I also want my lawyer to focus on lawyering, not dealing with Microsoft contracts, trying to keep confidential data out of copilot, dealing with proprietary formats, etc.
At the end of the day, every firm needs some form of IT. Above a certain scale you are hiring IT help to manage it anyway, might as well use free software where you can over MS. It’s not as if managing MS for a large org is particularly easy.
No, but my impression from this website is that he's a technology lawyer who enjoys maintaining his own stack, which strikes me as nothing but a plus.
As long as billable hours don't go towards sysadminning stuff, then what's the problem?
Reading the blog post, he isn't doing anything that unusual just using some open source applications that other people can use just as easily.
I doubt this blog post is intended for the benefit of his clients.
That said, as someone who is used to Linux and FOSS in my personal life but forced to use a typical corporate tech stack at work, I feel the tech I use at work is a hindrance more than anything and I would be more productive with the kind of stack the author describes.
>I doubt this blog post is intended for the benefit of his clients.
Well it is to their benefit to know this is what's going on, to that other poster's point.
> What do I do if something happens to you and another lawyer or paralegal has to step in?
This is one of the advantages of running free software. The data formats are open, so all of the data should be able to be imported any other system.
I‘ve heard it said earlier this year at a legal workshop that not using Microsoft Word in your law firm amounts to malpractice.
That was from a well known, respected, and long-time American Open Source lawyer.
Upvoting because it's an interesting statement, and also probably wrong?
As a techy person with a law degree that doesn't really practice any more, the "silos" of what each lawyer thinks is and isn't a "must have" is interesting, as well as the huge differences in rates and types of tech adoption; a huge factor here is probably administrative assistants who do a lot of heavy lifting.
you're explaining a clerical issue that lost a client a case caused by compatibility issue to other lawyers in a bar hgearing because your client sent you a document in a format that does not respect user freedom
they ask how you've managed to avoid this problem so far, and it turns out that you've been battling it nonstop for years
How do you justify that as a lawyer on the basis of "user freedom"?
Honestly your best defense is probably true ignorance or bad decision making that led you to choose something that, to non-developers, really only works as a way to save $100/yr or do some crazy new thing that didn't work. But that's still pretty bad.
Even if you're some crazy unix hacker wizard who for some reason works as a lawyer, how does never using Word help your client?
That’s recently changed.
Wordcraft is now a decent Word clone and is leaps and bounds over OpenOffice.
its pre release no one doing real work is going to risk their income on an alpha test
why does it matter for a word doc. At the end of the day, what matters is the doc file you save. that's your artifact. Weather you use a cli tool, agent or ms word to create that file doesn't matter as long as the content is correct and the person who receives the file can open it.
What's the point of saving $25 bucks or whatever a Word license is to use a vibe coded application?
25 bucks is 25 bucks. I also feel that losing your license because you tried to save 25 bucks on MS Word seems unlikely (not legal advice).
Is the cost of Word anywhere on anyone’s hate list?
Massive amounts of people hate the SAAS model and frequent end of support for older perpetual versions.
It's not even $25, it more like $10 / seat.
Because Wordcraft is faster and more stable than Word. Word rarely crashes, but it does freeze. Wordcraft is freezing about 1/2 as often as Word. For the daily grinding out docs, it's way more viable than Openoffice.
But mostly, because having a workflow entirely dependent on a single vendor seems like something to avoid if possible.
The last formatting bug I encountered was last week. Claude identified, patched, and pushed in 10 minutes.
It doesn't do VBA. However, porting VBA to WC macros is trivial for llms.
Why become hostage to a multibillion conglomerate for "editing text"? It's asinine what people are using Word for. If engineering types need special syntax handling I get it, but lawyers.. accountants.. my god man, plain text is fine with some semi-fancy markup a la markdown renderers these days. Some tables, some red lines, some fonts.. It's trivial. It was not in the 80s but it is now.
I haven’t used many of these vibe coded clones, but the ones I have used have all been significantly lacking in depth compared to what they are ripping off. I’m sure wordcraft works fine for typing a high school 5 paragraph essay (although, I don’t think high school students still do that). I would be shocked if it can handle revision history, complex redline edits, legal brief formatting, etc.
It handles complex redlines, legal brief formatting, etc.
When you convert to pdf, it typically produces identical content streams to Word.
I just tried it out of curiosity. It doesn't exist in their web suite, when I tried to run it using their launcher it failed to install and crashed the installer.
I can't directly refute your claims, but I can say that a program that won't install can't do any of those things for me.
I don't care if my lawyer doesn't use word. I do care if they use a buggy, vibe coded that is still in Alpha. Word processing is a solved problem. Free (beer or speech) word processing is a solved problem. Word compatible free word processing is a solved problem. Don't put my case in jeopardy because you want to use untested, alpha software.
Hard to diag from here. use claude code to launch and diag.
All your points are laughably trivial features. We don't "Word" for that bullshit.
Which parts of your bullshit do you use word for?
Not a lawyer but have hired many lawyers and had to interact with them: I agree this is correct.
[I am a US lawyer]
It's definitely not categorically malpractice to not use Word. Depends entirely on the situation. If a court demands docx and you file an rtf, or you refuse to read a client's redlines because they're in Word, sure, that could be malpractice.
The only proprietary software that I think _might_ be malpractice not to use is a legal research service with a capable citator, like Westlaw or LexisNexis. If you rely on a case that was overruled, you can't defend a malpractice suit by saying, "I didn't want to pay for the software."
I hear CourtListener (a free legal research tool) is working on a citator--hopefully it's competitive with the paid services.
I think the logic might be:
It's a certainty that your clients and colleagues will be using Word to work with you and the rest of the legal system, and some files will use docx.
It would be pretty bizarre to turn down work or make things harder for people outside your firm because you refuse to use Microsoft Word.
You could use another tool that handles .docx but if it's not directly compatible with Word you're almost guaranteed to run into compatibility issues or maybe serious errors. If you don't even touch Word at all, then the first person to run into them would might be your client. Do you not just immediately decide that it's not worth saving $100/yr to eliminate that kind of risk? If not then you have to say something like
I don't think someone with that kind of decision making should be a lawyer, not necessarily because it's wrong but because even if it's true, imagine explaining to the bar association that Arch started opting you into nightly builds?
Obviously there should be lawyers trying to use open source software, but I can't believe a real person would never run into compatibility issues. Richard stallman as a lawyer explaining that he can't open files sent in formats that do not respect user freedom is such a good bit
>I hear CourtListener (a free legal research tool) is working on a citator--hopefully it's competitive with the paid services.
Even if. it's not just the citation graph. No headnotes. No restatements. They're about 100 light years away from being close to usable, even if the citator was complete and comparable.
This must have been intended as hyperbole. It is true, in some legal practice areas, non-use of Word has been highly impractical or even impossible for a long time, mainly because in the mainstream legal profession generally Word quickly established a chokehold by the late 1990s.
Some courts expect Word format. I haven't been close to litigation in ages so I don't know how common a thing this is, but here's an example of an apparent "Word only" federal court: https://www.caed.uscourts.gov/caednew/index.cfm/attorney-inf... . So sure, in a hypothetical where a lawyer stubbornly refused to use Word in the context of a filing in that court, you can imagine consequences arising to the level of malpractice, but I don't think that's what they had in mind.
A more familiar issue to me (and I'm guessing what that speaker was thinking of) is that if you're negotiating an agreement with some other party, and they are using Word (as they most likely will be), it is going to be highly inconvenient at best to insist on using some alternative tool.
Red Hat's in house legal team is, er, was not a law firm of course, but ages ago Red Hat attempted to have as many 'back-office' staff use RHEL as possible, with few exceptions related to what was necessary for regulatory purposes. This extended to Red Hat's legal team, which attempted valiantly for a while to use OpenOffice (as was, and I suppose more specifically the RHEL packaging of the go-oo fork in those days) for all document-related purposes, including negotiating agreements with outside parties who were using Word. This proved to be impractical for at least the subset of the legal team that did that sort of work as their daily bread and butter, and eventually they got access to Word on Windows on VMware. Later on, it became possible for Red Hat lawyers to use OS X and Windows with Word, so the issue went away.
I'm surprised that courts do not mostly/exclusively want PDF.
Also, IIRC one of Wordperfect's last strongholds was in the legal sector, as they had so much invested in Wordperfect templates and (I'm told) its citation management fucntionality was good.
They do. Sometimes courts, when they want a proposed order, demand it in a Word format it so they can more easily edit it themselves.
> This must have been intended as hyperbole.
I sure hope so. The idea that if you want to work in [profession x] you have no choice but to pay the [megacorp y] tax is obscene, and should be fought against even as we acknowledge that it is often the reality.
We've come a long way since the days of Brandeis and the trust busters.
Geez, people here really struggle with the law. You have to read that whole thing.
That's only for documents that are required to be "submitted to the court in word processing format." It's an unusual circumstance when that is the case. 99.999% of all court documents are submitted as PDFs.
Only if an edge case could cause you to miss things (such as libreoffice missing redlines?). Seems unlikely IMO.
Yeah but they said they use “Word” documents when exchanging with other lawyers, etc. So I take that to mean they are exporting .docx with LibreOffice. I’m not sure I see what would be the issue with that?
Our law firm is using onlyoffice and there has been no problem yet.
The author wrote more about Word compatibility in their 2022 post https://decoded.legal/blog/2022/10/running-a-law-firm-on-lin...
> I had wondered if I would need to switch to Word for some documents but, so far, no.
> I don’t know how many “Word documents” I’ve worked on in the last year - low hundreds, at a guess - but there has been no problem.
> Even a document with hundreds of tracked changes and comments, and multiple contributors across multiple organisations - an unusual situation for me, anyway - was fine.
> (Admittedly, it took me a while how to deal with LibreOffice Writer’s tracked changes function and comments, but that was simply user error.)
> Text expansion: espanso
Have always loved that text shortcuts work across iOs and MacOs (yay, for integrated walled gardens).
Wanted the same thing for Linux and it seems like espanso + rsync(or git) for syncing the shortcuts across devices is the way to go.
I like the idea, but for 'normal' users - oh, yaml.
I see there's third party GUI tools but that adds more hassle for the non-technical.
Would be great if there was an inbuilt interface in espanso.
Settings > Keyboard > Text Replacements. Go nuts. All of these sync over iCloud to {i,mac,watch}OS
I would worry about using Postfix for a business. I've been running my own mail server for 25+ years using Postfix under the same domain, and once about 7-8 years ago incoming messages from GMail bounced because Google tightened its rules for server encryption. I added the DMARC or whatever else was required, and it all worked again, but to do this as a business, you have to regularly test sending e-mails from accounts with the big providers who make all the unwritten rules.
I set up a small law office with GMail for their domain, for this reason, and have a script ready to run a Postfix server if Google fails.
This is all really cool and inspiring. It makes me think “i want that!” but then I pause and think about it and the aggregate seems exhausting to maintain.
Are you actually able to get anything done at speed and scale with all of this FOSS and the finagling and wiring etc. it takes to maintain?
Does it make you a more effective and successful lawyer?
Does it increase/decrease the amount of time you have with friends and family?
It seems like this is a bit of a hobby, a bit of a marketing statement given the law area, and requires a very technically savvy lawyer to operate this system.
I think it'd be interesting for a firm to try to run without traditional software. Like the computer boots, you get a floating orb and you tell it stuff, it remembers, it stores it in an optimal format, it is capable of receiving, triaging, and sending synchronous or asynchronous communications externally or around the organization. It knows how to build just-in-time tools and can recall any information, displaying it in the most helpful format.
It's not clear what 'work' those orbs would be doing because a lot of 'work' exists because of current frictions due to bad tools or some arbitrage around a lack of trust or expertise. For example with contract redlines, if I just tell my AI what is important to me, and you tell yours, they can collaborate on a shared agreement that is essentially guaranteed to be fair (modulo trusting the AI). No emailing word documents back and forth, no ambiguity of obligations, no hiding misleading terms, etc.
The most important part would be that none of that work (input, work process or work product) ever left the building.
If you leak your client's confidence, you'd be liable for serious damages.
Curious what money software they were using:
Invoicing and tracking payments: InvoicePlane
Time tracking: Kimai
But no ERP? I presume their accountant is doing the books then?
Gnu cash?
I was the pro-se plaintiff in my civil case and thanks to Claude I got major kudos from the judge.
My biggest concern is having only one DevOps person. What happens if you get sick or are unavailable? You still need someone with around 5 years of DevOps experience. Being understaffed at critical moments can easily lead to losing customers. Also, how many employees and customers do you have? Do major clients, such as corporations or banks, require security certifications or specific processes? I think customers need to feel they can trust a company that is large enough and capable of taking responsibility, rather than a one-person company.
That's a weird comment. It's a small business with a static website that mainly runs over email/phone/signal. I'm not sure (speaking as a devops person with decades of experience) what a devops person would even do there; does a freelance artist need devops? Or a cat cafe?
You then ask how many employees they have, suggesting it's a one person company...I mean, it's right there on the website. It's Neil and Sandra, a husband and wife team. https://decoded.legal/diversity/ . They've been running successfully for five years, suggesting your concerns are unfounded.
This is common with solo practitioners. Sometimes you have to take weeks, months off, or suspend your practice. The answer would be referrals/your network, but obviously, in bad circumstances you can't always offer a soft landing to your clients.
The law firm that can never make it to court because they spend 80% of their time doing DevOps things like upgrading SW, patching vulns and exporting documents in the right format for discovery.
> DNS: unbound, with Pi-Hole in front of it
Pi-Hole seems redundant here. What is it doing that Unbound cannot itself do?
For email I would strongly recommend looking into also running rspamd , it integrates very well with postfix and cuts down on a vast quantity of incoming spam.
Surprised that LyX wasn't in the running as a way to gain access to the power of (La)TeX with a familiar graphical front-end.
My gf is a lawyer with a single-person office and the only software she uses is a word document (advanced from an A4 paper) to write outstanding issues, next appointments, advances etc. As can be understood not very technical.
Could you recommend me a way to gently introduce some kind of software/automation to her office?
TIA
Give her Claude and show her how to ask Claude how to do things. My wife uses it to write mini scripts now for all the annoying repetitive tasks she has. Zero programming background.
As a lawyer who vibe codes using Claude code all of the time and believes it's the highest value case... I'm going to disagree with this suggestion.
If she never uses ai at work at all, start with something dead simple: -do research with it -put a large corpus of documents into LLM context and ask questions of it
That's probably where I'd start.
Fair although I’m surprised lawyers can load privileged info into Claude? But I guess at this point Claude just gets all the worlds data haha
AFAIK no state level organisation has sanctioned someone for this. You can opt-out of data collection, which some practitioners think is good enough to satisfying their professional liability- risk tolerance depends on the individual (this is not advice, just my observation!)
A large corpus of documents does not have to mean privileged info. Put all of the public documents from a case in there and ask it about a judges reasoning.
Honestly that wouldn’t be a terrible product: Pull in all of a judges written judgements or stated logic about their rulings and preemptively craft your case around their biases.
She is comfortable typing in MS Word and she uses a browser (assumed). Start her using a Wiki with Markdown.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki_software
The browser gives viewing, screenshotting, and PDF downloading/viewing for free.
MD is pretty simple, but why would a lawyer want to learn a limited,presentation-oriented syntax? And a wiki? Both of these decisions would make red lining a new, unpleasant adventure, something every lawyer I know does A LOT.
Highly relevant: On the Immortality of Microsoft Word [0] (and the HN discussion [1]).
[0]: https://theredline.versionstory.com/p/on-the-immortality-of-...
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46313518
It's not so gentle, but lawyers in the US have told me that their malpractice insurance requires them to have practice management software - calendar, document management, case management, customer management, billing and accounting.
Find a web-hosted practice management system, start with the piece she finds most valuable and easy to use (maybe a calendar?).
My girlfriend is also a lawyer with a single-person office (well a part-time legal assistant).
I’d try to learn a bit more about her workflow. My partner has a contract with the state, cyber insurance, and has some records retention requirements which inform a lot of the technology. As an example discovery for some cases can run 100gbs and require 10 years of retention. She has to file a monthly report with very specific data requirements and we’re working on the extract out of the matter management because it doesn’t support an effective-as-of for the various fields which is needed.
I’ve found a good place to start is with how email and calendaring is used and implementing more security. Presuming she’s using hosted email (m365/gmail) or similar.
Maybe start with her calendar especially if she’s doing it on paper even more so if she’s using that to drive any client contact.
Westlaw isn't software?
It's her system. She uses it for a reason that may not make sense to you but makes perfect sense to her.
If you want to ease her into automation, either a calendaring system or a practice management suite like Clio or Zola. Leave AI and more technical solutions for much, much later.
What's the free software recommendation for accounting? GnuCash?
Lawyer here.
I have been extensively using LibreOffice in my court drafting, research, report writings and it has helped.. Over the years i have seen the progression of software, bugs I reported having been fixed in 2-3-5 releases always makes me happy.
People hate it for reasons that feel wrong.
They want a "mirror" of word, that's... Not going to happen, at least not in the UX department.
For compatibility, it is being improved iteratively.
I am on the fence for wordcraft by storytold for now.
That said, I do self host email using mailinabox.
I do use KDE neon for my own machine.
I have to use some business software which are windows based so I have to use that.. I just rdp into the machine and it works.
I don't use collaborative software because most of the time it's just me.
This is a fun blog idea, I'm going to steal it. I've been running a software engineering co-op for the last 5 years using only self hosted and FOSS software (outside of our email server and discord).
The bulk of it is run through ERPnext, which handles timesheets, invoices (client and member side), and accounting. We built some modules for ERPnext to make that as automated as possible, some of which I've finally got together this week: https://github.com/508-dev/erp_rules https://github.com/508-dev/books_health I used to use Crater for accounting, but it could only handle very basic accounting, so I switched to GnuCash, which I found too complicated but also too difficult to collaborate with, thus ERPnext.
We run member application management and BD pipeline through EspoCRM. Outline for wiki. Authentik for identity provider. Keila for newsletter emails. Vaultwarden for password management. Docuseal in place of Docusign. Nextcloud for basically all Google Drive / Docs / Calendar features, though it's quite slow in comparison. Coolify as a generic PAAS for MVPs or random member projects. Cal.com for appointments. Oh, to be fair, I still just route those to Google Meet.
I wish we could get a self hosted Discord alternative, however I found Matrix to be too unintuitive of a UX, and member participation was plummeting.
I've given a couple talks on self hosting and FOSS. Especially in the age of LLMs, I think it's very viable to move away from expensive SaaS. Just this week I had claude adding a ton of automations to our ERP, which probably isn't as possible for proprietary SaaS. Being able to straight up clone the codebase down and read/modify it directly makes for some interesting possibilities that we can then just as easily deploy ourselves since we self host. Using VPSs
ERPnext has CRM functionality built in, though I haven't used it. Is it not at the same level as EspoCRM?
Interesting.
To the lawyers, they can use software being available for free both as in for $0 and freedom as in libre (including choosing to not pay for it and not being obligated to pay developers at all) while their service of legal advice is not free and always costs money.
Guess who wins here? (Hint: It isn't the volunteer open source developer)
> Guess who wins here? (Hint: It isn't the volunteer open source developer)
Why not? Do you think open source developers all have the same goals? Do you think they don't like it when people use their software?
Plenty of lawyers offer "pro bono" services to non-profits, indigents, and others who can't afford their services. At most firms, pro bono hours are required.
As a percentage of their respective industries, more lawyers engage in some pro bono/charity work than programmers.
"I'm a mechanic and I hand forge new spanners every time I work on a car."
Cool story bro, but surely your time is worth too much to spend it fiddling about linux and command lines.
But it's not worth too much to deal with crappy proprietary software?
I know a lot of open source software is a pain in the ass, but so is a lot of proprietary software. You use what you know, understand, and can support.
> "I'm a mechanic and I hand forge new spanners every time I work on a car."
This is a bad analogy. It's not like he's writing new software every time he has to do something. It's more like using tools that your machinist friends built.