Running a law firm on Free software
decoded.legal
decoded.legal
I've been using Linux on the desktop from 2000 onwards, and exclusively about 2005 or so. I've been a law student using free software, and I wrote my lawyer's thesis in LaTeX.
I practice law using LibreOffice, and I'm having no problem using it. I keep a Word365 install in a Windows partition for compatibility purposes, but I almost don't use it (the fact that it forces that hideous ribbon interface on me doesn't help... Hey MS, give us a proper WIMP menu back!).
For PDFs I use Okular, which handles digital signatures well and also offers a bunch of annotation features.
My Linux setup is Slackware-current, right now I'm using Plasma 6.8.
If anything, Linux and free software helped me work more efficiently.
They exited secondaries in 2024 after blowback from using everyone’s data. But I could see them trying again soon.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
Also if you give your lawyer a document, that's privileged. If you upload it to Harvey, who knows?
Just like emailing your lawyer on Office365 doesn’t get rid of client attorney either.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Well it is to their benefit to know this is what's going on, to that other poster's point.
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.
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.
Like Intuit raising quickbook prices by 20% every few months.
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.
A lot of clients won't care but for certain clients this signals that their lawyer understands their values.
I assume deliverables are indistinguishable from any other firm, it's not like they are submitting a brief in OpenDocument Format.
You are.
That was from a well known, respected, and long-time American Open Source 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.
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.
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?"
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
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.)
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.
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?
Wordcraft is now a decent Word clone and is leaps and bounds over OpenOffice.
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.
When you convert to pdf, it typically produces identical content streams to Word.
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.
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 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.
Invoicing and tracking payments: InvoicePlane
Time tracking: Kimai
But no ERP? I presume their accountant is doing the books then?
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 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.
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.
If you leak your client's confidence, you'd be liable for serious damages.
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.
Could you recommend me a way to gently introduce some kind of software/automation to her office?
TIA
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki_software
The browser gives viewing, screenshotting, and PDF downloading/viewing for free.
[0]: https://theredline.versionstory.com/p/on-the-immortality-of-...
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.
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.
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.
Find a web-hosted practice management system, start with the piece she finds most valuable and easy to use (maybe a calendar?).
Pi-Hole seems redundant here. What is it doing that Unbound cannot itself do?
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.
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
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)
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?
As a percentage of their respective industries, more lawyers engage in some pro bono/charity work than programmers.
Cool story bro, but surely your time is worth too much to spend it fiddling about linux and command lines.
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.