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Comments (104)

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  NoboruWataya
  I'm jealous, I'd love to be able to do this. I am a small cog in a big legal machine so I am stuck with whatever tech stack my firm mandates. Outlook + Word + a bunch of incredibly unintuitive, slow, buggy and I'm sure overpriced apps for billing, version control, contact management, training, etc etc. Word has so many corporate add-ons installed that sometimes it just collapses under its own weight and crashes when I'm trying to work on a basic document.
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  theturtletalks
  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.
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  netshade
  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?
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  skeeter2020
  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?
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  Tomte
  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.
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  alexpotato
  > Text expansion: espansoHave 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.
• raegis
  I would worry about using Postfix for a business. I've been running my own mail server for 25+ years using Postfix under the same domain, and once about 7-8 years ago incoming messages from GMail bounced because Google tightened its rules for server encryption. I added the DMARC or whatever else was required, and it all worked again, but to do this as a business, you have to regularly test sending e-mails from accounts with the big providers who make all the unwritten rules.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.
• pclowes
  This is all really cool and inspiring. It makes me think “i want that!” but then I pause and think about it and the aggregate seems exhausting to maintain.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.
• walrus01
  For email I would strongly recommend looking into also running rspamd , it integrates very well with postfix and cuts down on a vast quantity of incoming spam.
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  siliconc0w
  I think it'd be interesting for a firm to try to run without traditional software. Like the computer boots, you get a floating orb and you tell it stuff, it remembers, it stores it in an optimal format, it is capable of receiving, triaging, and sending synchronous or asynchronous communications externally or around the organization. It knows how to build just-in-time tools and can recall any information, displaying it in the most helpful format.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.
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  xtiansimon
  Curious what money software they were using:Invoicing and tracking payments: InvoicePlaneTime tracking: KimaiBut no ERP? I presume their accountant is doing the books then?
• lovetocode
  I was the pro-se plaintiff in my civil case and thanks to Claude I got major kudos from the judge.
• aetherspawn
  The law firm that can never make it to court because they spend 80% of their time doing DevOps things like upgrading SW, patching vulns and exporting documents in the right format for discovery.
• drnick1
  > DNS: unbound, with Pi-Hole in front of itPi-Hole seems redundant here. What is it doing that Unbound cannot itself do?
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  99harry
  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.
• WillAdams
  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.
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  spapas82
  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
• nairboon
  What's the free software recommendation for accounting? GnuCash?
• 2Gkashmiri
  Lawyer here.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.
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  komali2
  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
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  rvz
  Interesting.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)
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  gadders
  "I'm a mechanic and I hand forge new spanners every time I work on a car."Cool story bro, but surely your time is worth too much to spend it fiddling about linux and command lines.
• obummer
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