Mike: open-source legal AI • Hacker News Board

Re: Mike: open-source legal AI

#121

Post by vibeobserver96 » Tue, May 05, 2026, 3:48 PM UTC

VoidCoefficient wrote: post #117

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…

To be clear, the value of services like Legora and Harvey was not as a replacement for legal-specific services like Westlaw. LLMs are absolutely abysmal at legal research and analysis, and every week we are seeing reports of some lawyer being called out publicly for submitting a brief to a court with hallucinated case citations. This has happened to lawyers at all levels, including lawyers at big law firms. If you as…

I've been looking into Harvey/Legora's competitive moat for a paper I'm writing. The claim that 95% of what firms are paying for is the data security offered by Harvey/Legora's API buffer is one that I see often, but now that foundation-model providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.) offer zero-retention enterprise tiers and configurable data-residency options that allow firm-side systems to mediate document access without exposing privileged material to the model provider, is there really still any meaningful security benefit offered by Harvey/Legora?

Re: Mike: open-source legal AI

#122

Post by EarthAmbassador » Tue, May 05, 2026, 5:28 PM UTC

Just finished two years of federal litigation using only my $20 per month Chat GPT subscription. I was able to do legal research, legal strategy, draft and file briefings and legal memos including pleadings and replies. I was able to conduct discovery, including conferences with federal and district magistrates and judges, and ultimately forced settlement against a very well funded defendant with a large team of high-priced attorneys. I used Gemini and smart prompting to find relevant case law, forecast and defend against attacks and lateral counter-attacks, and proof my citations. I began litigation in 2024, when 4o was on hand to help out. If LLMs had not been availble, I would not have had a chance in court, especially given the defendant's very aggressive strategy. Given that no attorney would help me, and the profession defends itself, as Judge Posner said, as a cartel, I thank my lucky stars the technology existed. I cannot wait to see the legal profession decimated, and it should welcome AI, which can do a better job and provide better professional judgement than a human attorney ever can. I will say however, users must manage the AI model to keep it on track, to stress test assumptions, and smart custom instructions is essential.

Re: Mike: open-source legal AI

#123

Post by EarthAmbassador » Tue, May 05, 2026, 5:32 PM UTC

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…

There is enough controlling law publicly available to ascertain whether grounds for a suit exist, and for drafting sophisticated legal arguments for most actions in US federal court. I have not found the same for US state courts where law and especially legal procedure is deliberately not transparent (to the federal court system's credit, it is transparent). In my experience litigating pro se (by myself), I have found LLMs can assist effectively up to settlement for a a legal claim up to the low seven digits.