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.
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?
I also want my lawyer to focus on lawing, 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 as MS. It’s not as if managing MS for a large org is particularly easy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
This is funny, but the amlaw100 law firms signing up to enterprise saas have probably thought about their data protection terms
Just like how openAI and Anthropic have suddenly started consulting firms, right after obtaining everyone’s IP and secret documents.
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.
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?
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.
I also want my lawyer to focus on lawing, 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 as MS. It’s not as if managing MS for a large org is particularly easy.
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.
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.
> Am I alone in my reaction
You are.
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.
> 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.
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.
Only if an edge case could cause you to miss things (such as libreoffice missing redlines?). Seems unlikely IMO.
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 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.
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.
Not a lawyer but have hired many lawyers and had to interact with them: I agree this is correct.
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
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.
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).
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.