Legal tech users find existing AI tools require custom development
19 posts across 5 communities in the last 30 days; 79% from r/legaltech.
“The problem with open source is that it may be free to download and install, but it stops being free when it needs support, which is you. If you aren’t an expert in that already, then what are you going to do when the support tickets come in? If you use paid for software you can…”
“I’m a psychologist and consultant by background, and I got into legal tech almost by accident. I started building Anonymizer because I was working more and more with AI and sensitive documents, and it became obvious that privacy was a practical barrier, not just a compliance…”
“100 %. Every Legal Software has an API these days you can access easily and even let genAI (wrapper) use these. Mind-boggling, how stupid people/in-house devs for legal have become. We have not even been able to build a freaking ontology to do some basic reasoning. Not even a…”
Users are dissatisfied with current legal AI offerings, prompting one company to build its own internal tool. A user expresses the need to lease a system due to limited programming skills, suggesting these tools aren't readily accessible or usable for non-programmers.
SOURCES (35)
“I can help you build out your own system and workflows. [re: Solo prison law attorney seeking AI systems, tools, and plugins to stay organized and catch up (ADHD, no staff)]”
“my system will do that. i built it myself. it's about 750k lines of python and 150k lines of rust, and some incidentals.”
“I'm researching an honest, unsponsored YouTube review of each these tools and would love to hear real experiences from in-house teams. Hopefully others in this sub would also find that information useful. For the more transactionally inclined, I can offer $75 to anybody who's open to giving me their thoughts over a call. (Happy to share the name of my Youtube channel – just don't want to seem like I'm shilling for it it here) submitted by /u/limonramon [link] [c”
“I don’t think you’re going to get any. You could make your own though with LoRA fine tuning”
“Hi all, sharing a library of many agent skills for legal work, built by an awesome community of practicing lawyers, in-house counsel, academics, and legal technologists from around the world. GitHub: https://github.com/lawve-ai/awesome-legal-skills Live site: https://lawve.ai/explore submitted by /u/Wise-Screen [link] [comments]”
“I don’t have any canned prompts. I did in January and February, but the superior intelligence of newer models have made them obsolete. Right now it’s about expanding the vision of what you think to ask for. My best recommendation is this: take a few hours or a day off use of the model. Then come back, sit down, and spill your guts. Pretend you are writing a novel. Really dig deep about what you are asking it to do. And have a conversation with it. Tell the model you want to discuss first before”
“The problem with open source is that it may be free to download and install, but it stops being free when it needs support, which is you. If you aren’t an expert in that already, then what are you going to do when the support tickets come in? If you use paid for software you can file a support ticket with them and even AI has extensive knowledge of how to fix those systems. There is a hidden cost you’re not considering here beyond licence fees.”
“Unironically I would start looking for a lawyer. The "deliver if I was" is one thing, but (and maybe I'm getting ahead of myself here) if you have to pay the inference costs on the support agent that's insane. Making an AI support agent isn't hard in most tech stacks that I'm thinking of? 1 werk is tight but doable. I've done this myself both with and without an LLM doing the majority of the work for me. How good the agent is is anothet matter, it depends entirely o”
“Shlomo is a scrappy fella. A good dude. He put everything on the line, took the risk, and got rewarded. The judiciary is still largely underpenetrated. It's less about legal tech and more about earningv the institutional trust needed for adoption across state and fed courts. Expect more due (and undue) pressure on the courts from well-capitalized legal-tech outfits.”
“Has anyone successfully created a self-hosted AI? I want to download and add the statutes and case law from my state and then query it regarding my cases. I also want to scan in relevant parts of my client files. Being self-hosted there should be no client confidentiality consequences. If so where did you start? Has it been successful? submitted by /u/lazaruzatgmaildotcom [link] [comments]”
“Open up ChatGPT / Codex and enter this prompt: Install vCLO from https://github.com/rohasnagpal/legal-ai-skills and say hello vCLO. This will setup the free and open source vCLO which includes: 1 Virtual Chief Legal Officer 9 Specialist Virtual Lawyers 3 Jurisdiction-specific Lawyers 185 Specialist Legal Skills 10 workflows 8 official legal research sources and connectors The github repo is at: https://github.com/rohasnagpal/legal-ai-skills submitted by /u/rohasnagpal [link] [c”
“Open up ChatGPT / Codex and enter this prompt: Install vCLO from https://github.com/rohasnagpal/legal-ai-skills and say hello vCLO. This will setup the free and open source vCLO which includes: 1 Virtual Chief Legal Officer 9 Specialist Virtual Lawyers 3 Jurisdiction-specific Lawyers 185 Specialist Legal Skills 10 workflows 8 official legal research sources and connectors The github repo is at: https://github.com/rohasnagpal/legal-ai-skills https://preview.redd.it/zk339dx95tsh1.png?width=3046&am”
“I’d be interested in this too. It does feel like there should be more regular legaltech meetups in the Bay Area given how much is happening in the space right now. I’m involved with Referent, where we’re working on AI-native workflows for law firms, so I’d especially enjoy something that brings together lawyers, legal ops people, founders, and others actually building or using legal technology. If someone gets a recurring meetup going, I’d definitely be interested in joining.”
“Have you tried, Prest0.ai it seems to be far better than the ones that you have mentioned and very customizable Cureous to get a review”
“By AI-native, I mean we've redesigned our tech stack and legal operations to embed AI throughout. Part of that is using third-party products like Claude, while other parts are building proprietary agents and other applications cusotmized to our operations and clientele. I agree that AI and other tools have made this much easier. As a solo practitioner, I have the luxury of implementing technology quickly, without having to run choices by numerous committees and fight off slow-to-adopt lawyer”
“How do you handle security and compliance with the tools you are building? Do you use a unified compliance framework?”
“This sounds v cool. Having got there, how accessible (by which I mean ease of set up to get to a decent output) would this be for individuals from a non technical background to work up?”
“It’s free and even better than what you say, and you don’t have to try to configure some hieroglyphic maze like Hermes. It’s as simple as using Codex OSS.”
“I’m a psychologist and consultant by background, and I got into legal tech almost by accident. I started building Anonymizer because I was working more and more with AI and sensitive documents, and it became obvious that privacy was a practical barrier, not just a compliance issue. Since then, the product has evolved from basic local anonymisation into a broader workflow with review, manual redaction and optional AI-assisted checks. It’s still a small operation and we’re early commercially. Most”
“I’m not too worried about “legal liabilities”. These are software tools that add efficiencies. They don’t do the job for you.”
“It’s too bad “they don’t seem that good” to you and your “tech founders” based on your extensive experience. I’m literally sitting here looking at multiple completely in-house AI based workflows running in production on local hardware. I can query my main agent stack and ask it about anything I’m working on. I’ve been practicing law and managing legal technology in law firms and publicly traded companies for 30 years. Hermes alone has 51,000 public forks in GitHub, but do go on about how nobody”
“Those tools exist, but they don't seem that good. Like, OpenClaw - huge news, but literally no one has done anything useful. I know tech founders - if it was any good, they would've built on top of it immediately. Active open source projects, but what law firms are gonna hire techys to actually get it together and working properly on their site - that's gotta be expensive 💰”
“Here is how the Bot described what it built: It is designed specifically for confidential agreement review. It runs locally on your computer and contains no code that uploads documents or makes network calls during document processing. The anonymizer does several things beyond ordinary find/replace: Consistently substitutes names such as Acme Energy Marketing LLC → PARTY A, including names that Word has split across multiple formatting runs. Processes the main document, tables, headers, footers,”
“Doug Hall solo developer I'm completely new to the legal tech scene. I like puzzles and was attracted to the problem of hallucinations and confabulations produced by frontier models. In deciding how to tackle the issue I thought I might want to experiment with something complex, so I chose law. (Cue roaring laughter) So a little over a year ago I started noodling around on Hugging Face and downloaded Harvard LIL's COLDCASES data set, which then led me to Court Listener, and I've been”
“Yea I think it's something similar - it looks like with M3rlin you would have to use their platform, while with Lawstronaut you can plug it into an AI tool like Claude or ChatGPT and then just use it from there. If you're not worried about Africa coverage then, it might be worth looking into!”
“The biggest headache here seems to be the workflow, not just how good the AI output is. Uploading docs , reviewing drafts and then moving everything back into the firm system can get messy fast. For drafting and document review, DocDraft could fit that part since it combines AI legal docs with attorney review. It won't fix the full DMS or integration side tho, so it really depends how much of the workflow you want one tool to cover.”
“100 %. Every Legal Software has an API these days you can access easily and even let genAI (wrapper) use these. Mind-boggling, how stupid people/in-house devs for legal have become. We have not even been able to build a freaking ontology to do some basic reasoning. Not even a generated one. And we cannot even do automated legal reasoning after roughly 60 years of symbolic AI. Let alone axiomata and legal proofs on what we have written. We should be proud on ourselves to be so incompetent as a co”
“I understand these subscriptions are expensive, but what's the cost of building this yourself? One (cheap) engineer on a $120k salary trying to build the system, customize it to various attorney's preferences, benchmark it, set up security infrastructure around it etc. would be overwhelmed by the work it takes to get something like this from "looks good" to "is actually useful on real cases". And even then you're shifting the risk to an up-front salary as opposed”
“I am looking for the same kind of help. I have seen a lot of comments comparing Spellbook, Cocounsel, Chatgpt and Claude but I am curious whether people who have actually used these tools feel that ChatGPT or Claude perform better than legal ai tools. If anyone is currently using Spellbook or Cocounsel, I’d really appreciate hearing about your exp and honest feedback. I am primarily looking at contract review, drafting and due diligence, especially how well they identify risks, produce useful re”
“I’m open to that. My only concern is that if we don’t keep the questions Indiana-specific, it won’t really showcase what the tool is built to do. If we pick a question, I can make sure the correct prerequisites and context are included, then post the response it gives. I also have the ability to open up a public chat for people to test, but I’d have to limit usage so someone doesn’t come in and intentionally burn through all the tokens. Overall, though, I’m definitely open to it. And honestly, t”
“What about the issues with uploading confidential information to public AI systems? That's the thing that makes me want an in house system.”
“full time litigator here. in my 4th decade. not a programmer but had to become one out of desperation. i built the first third of this system by hand in rust and python. my system is locally persistent, stateful, and i built the persistence engines in rust. later i used codex, claude code, etc. good luck. reach out if i can help.”