Mike: open-source legal AI
86 points by noleary 9 hours ago | 33 comments

reverius42 4 hours ago
Presumably this is an issue for the commercial competitors too, but in light of the recent court ruling in United States v. Heppner that AI chatbots can break attorney-client privilege and/or work product doctrine, what kinds of things can this be safely used for? (I would assume you want to avoid sending anything with client-confidential information in it to a service provider like OpenAI or Anthropic.)

Potentially if used with a local LLM and not a service provider, this might protect attorney-client privilege?

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victorbjorklund 10 minutes ago
It’s not different from googling. If a non-lawyer googles legal advice (”how to give yourself an alibi after murdering someone”) it will not be protected by attorney-client privilege. Same if you ask OpenAI.
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llagerlof 2 minutes ago
This. I am telling this since the boom of generative AI and promptly being ignored.
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robertritz 2 hours ago
United States v. Heppner mentioned a public chatbot service. If a law firm (or specialized provider) offered a chatbot using their own servers and hosted the traces and other data on the law firms own servers it would almost certainly be protected. But another case would need to happen to determine that.

But that only applies for clients using the chatbot. If a lawyer is using the LLM it is definitely protected. No different if a lawyer searches something on Google or Lexis Nexis. The search itself is protected. I guess you could debate metadata but the content surely is protected.

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debarshri 2 hours ago
you can have dedicated deployment per customer per case, segregating it logically. I have seen this happen in larger law firms. It could be based on groups, teams, partners etc.
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NikolaosC 2 hours ago
[dead]
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kostarelo 3 hours ago
For a moment I thought it was some open-source LLM trained on legal. It's not, it's a web app wrapping major LLM providers and streamlining legal workflows, uploading documents, and having the LLM providers interact with them.

Cool project regardless!

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dahcryn 37 minutes ago
yeah I thought that was the USP of Legora and Harvey, so this is not the same thing at all, just surfing the brand recognition
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syntaxing 6 hours ago
I always wondered if Justin Kan’s Atrium closed door prematurely by just 2-3 years. It would have been cool to see a “technology” driven law firm and how it would have adjusted to LLMs.
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kernalix7 5 hours ago
Self-hostable legal AI as open source is a useful direction in principle. Hard to tell how mature the actual implementation is though, the repo is pretty fresh and the marketing site is doing a lot of heavy lifting compared to what's in the code right now. Will be more interesting to revisit in a few weeks.
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0xbadcafebee 3 hours ago
Rule of tech products: the nicer the splash page is, the worse the product is
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superfrank 2 hours ago
Apple would like a word...
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sandreas 6 hours ago
Cool project. What a pity it's not mikefoss.com, would match the soundex of Mike Ross from suits even better ;-)
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re_spond 7 hours ago
Cool initiative. Is this fully separate from "legal Mike", the Dutch company that provides a similar solution, https://legalmike.ai/product/ ?

That may be confusing on the naming.

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iot_devs 4 hours ago
I thought it was named after the characters of Suits: Harvey and Mike
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campers 5 hours ago
Interested to try it out! Some feedback on the homepage there's nothing above the fold, or directly below that says its a Legal AI platform. I would like a legal AI tool, but I'm not familiar with the space don't know what Harvey or Legora are. It was only the hackernews title "Mike: open-source legal AI" that gave the context.
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wps 6 hours ago
This website is actually gorgeous. What do you call this style?
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NamlchakKhandro 6 hours ago
It's called "We just discovered Claude Code and so we think Anthropic is Amazing so everything they do is godlike and thus their design choices must also be god like. Apple is Dead, Long Live Anthropic" style.
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anon373839 5 hours ago
Hm, I don't think this looks like Anthropic's design style. Anthropic is kind of doing a Chobanicore + Corporate Memphis design system that I personally find kind of creepy. But the website here just feels fresh and pleasant.
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rvz 4 hours ago
> Apple is Dead, Long Live Anthropic" style.

Except that the font that it is using is EB Garamond and Apple was heavily using the Garamond font in the mid-1980s to 2000s.

Given that almost everyone is copying both, it is now garbage.

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anon373839 6 hours ago
Agreed; that's a beautiful site. The main design style apart from minimalism that I notice is glassmorphism. Well, that and a very well chosen Monet to set the tone.
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scosman 7 hours ago
2 commits, 8 hours old....
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georgespencer 3 hours ago
OP's Github profile looks very fishy.
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albertgoeswoof 6 hours ago
And yet 130 stars
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KingOfCoders 58 minutes ago
Not saying they did, but buying a 100 starts is cheap.
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dalemhurley 4 hours ago
Amazing work, 130 stars is quite high for a niche product within hours!
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m4rkuskk 5 hours ago
No way they got that many stars in that little time. buy.fans must run a special right now.
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albertgoeswoof 6 hours ago
How does this work with docx files? The screenshots only show pdfs?
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timdim 56 minutes ago
LibreOffice for DOC/DOCX to PDF conversion
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higginsniggins 4 hours ago
Beautiful website.
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kleiba2 3 hours ago
I'm so tired of having to sign up to some new service even just to try it out.
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robertritz 2 hours ago
So open up your new product to every random agent and griefer on the internet? Why would you do that?
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kleiba2 2 hours ago
No, I mean just to try it out.
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dfordp11 5 hours ago
[dead]
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