A lawyer runs his entire firm on free software, with zero problems from clients
Running a law firm on Free software
Neil Brown, who runs the small English tech-law firm decoded.legal, gives his 2026 update on going fully free-software. On the client side: Debian with GNOME on a ThinkPad, Thunderbird and mutt, LibreOffice, pandoc and typst, reveal.js, and vimwiki. On the server: self-hosted postfix/dovecot, Syncthing, Kimai, EspoCRM, Forgejo, and restic. He dropped Nextcloud, Jitsi, and CryptPad, uses GrapheneOS on a Pixel, and touches no AI tools.
No change here: zero problems. Many of my clients use Microsoft's software, or Apple's software.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.