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Mike: open-source legal AI

mikeoss.com

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Re: Mike: open-source legal AI

#101

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

jbstack wrote: post #88
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a reason why companies like Thomson Reuters have an oligopoly on these types of products, and can get away with charging thousands a year. They are the only ones with access to a comprehensive set of case law, and they've entrenched their position by having exclusive contracts with the law reporting companies. I'm not in the legal field, but can someone explain that further? I would have expected that all c…

Yes, it sounds crazy and against the principle of open justice, but unfortunately this is the reality. Certainly in the UK which is my jurisdiction - and I believe in the US too although I don't know for sure. In theory, any member of the public can obtain a judgment by applying for one at the court and paying a fee. That's fine if you just need a one-off judgment, don't mind paying the fee, and you're not in a hurry…

Related question, then - what do judges use when they have to write opinions in the first place? Do they have to follow the same process and use Thomson Reuters?

It's obviously even more important for judges (compared to lawyers) to be able to easily search all of the relevant case law to see which cases are controlling and would have precedence. Seems bizarre to me that this critical function would be gated behind a corporation.

Re: Mike: open-source legal AI

#102

Post by fittingopposite »

jcfrei wrote: post #50

I believe this is the direction enterprise software is generally going. An open-source base with a very permissive license that then each company can adapt (with claude, codex, etc.) for it's own needs. It's either running it on it's own infrastructure or in hosted environment by the author. I've built a similarly extensible codebase for an ERP: https://github.com/lambdadevelopment/lambda-erp

This is AGPL.

Re: Mike: open-source legal AI

#103

Post by r0fl »

jbstack wrote: post #76

Legal professional here. This is NOT a replacement for proper legal AI assistants (e.g. Westlaw, in my jurisdiction). As far as I can tell, this is just a wrapper around regular LLMs i.e. nothing that you couldn't achieve yourself with the right prompting. What legal professionals actually pay for, and that is virtually impossible to replicate unfortunately, is to give the AI access to a legal database of case law. W…

In Canada there is a database of a lot of case law here: https://www.canlii.org/

Theoretically speaking if someone scraped all of it and added it to something like this open source Mike project would that then be a much better tool for lawyers?

Re: Mike: open-source legal AI

#106

Post by whattheheckheck »

jbstack wrote: post #88
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a reason why companies like Thomson Reuters have an oligopoly on these types of products, and can get away with charging thousands a year. They are the only ones with access to a comprehensive set of case law, and they've entrenched their position by having exclusive contracts with the law reporting companies. I'm not in the legal field, but can someone explain that further? I would have expected that all c…

Yes, it sounds crazy and against the principle of open justice, but unfortunately this is the reality. Certainly in the UK which is my jurisdiction - and I believe in the US too although I don't know for sure. In theory, any member of the public can obtain a judgment by applying for one at the court and paying a fee. That's fine if you just need a one-off judgment, don't mind paying the fee, and you're not in a hurry…

This all needs to be publicly accessible for free. Gonna see how blatently inconsistent laws and interpretations are

Re: Mike: open-source legal AI

#107

Post by kavalg »

fittingopposite wrote: post #102
jcfrei wrote: post #50

I believe this is the direction enterprise software is generally going. An open-source base with a very permissive license that then each company can adapt (with claude, codex, etc.) for it's own needs. It's either running it on it's own infrastructure or in hosted environment by the author. I've built a similarly extensible codebase for an ERP: https://github.com/lambdadevelopment/lambda-erp

This is AGPL.

How come? the github page says the license is MIT.

Re: Mike: open-source legal AI

#108

Post by meekaaku »

jcfrei wrote: post #50

I believe this is the direction enterprise software is generally going. An open-source base with a very permissive license that then each company can adapt (with claude, codex, etc.) for it's own needs. It's either running it on it's own infrastructure or in hosted environment by the author. I've built a similarly extensible codebase for an ERP: https://github.com/lambdadevelopment/lambda-erp

This looks great. The demo is very fast. Is it static generated or is it reading the sql db?

Re: Mike: open-source legal AI

#109

Post by gadders »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #101
jbstack wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it sounds crazy and against the principle of open justice, but unfortunately this is the reality. Certainly in the UK which is my jurisdiction - and I believe in the US too although I don't know for sure. In theory, any member of the public can obtain a judgment by applying for one at the court and paying a fee. That's fine if you just need a one-off judgment, don't mind paying the fee, and you're not in a hurry…

Related question, then - what do judges use when they have to write opinions in the first place? Do they have to follow the same process and use Thomson Reuters? It's obviously even more important for judges (compared to lawyers) to be able to easily search all of the relevant case law to see which cases are controlling and would have precedence. Seems bizarre to me that this critical function would be gated behind a…

They have staff that do it for them :-)

Re: Mike: open-source legal AI

#110

Post by jbstack »

ericmcer wrote: post #97
jbstack wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it sounds crazy and against the principle of open justice, but unfortunately this is the reality. Certainly in the UK which is my jurisdiction - and I believe in the US too although I don't know for sure. In theory, any member of the public can obtain a judgment by applying for one at the court and paying a fee. That's fine if you just need a one-off judgment, don't mind paying the fee, and you're not in a hurry…

those steps are what a RAG LLM agent setup excels at. If tech companies invested 10% of what they have in AI assisted coding tools into AI assisted legal tools, they would be able to do those steps easily. It is definitely coming.

You can have as much RAG as you like, but if you're missing the data itself (the legal judgments), it's useless. The fundamental problem here isn't technical, it's that a very small number of corporations have complete control over the source material.
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