A legal AI trinity?
Last week AI reached a new dimension when Pope Leo XIV made it the topic of his first encyclical, or teaching document, entitled Magnifica Humanitas. Pope Leo highlighted the danger of the ‘technocratic paradigm’ where choices are dictated by efficiency and profits, urged clarity about responsibilities and accountabilities, and shared standards of social justice and environmental impact. He stated his belief that AI should be ‘disarmed’, explaining that “To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity”. He went further, apologising for the Catholic Church’s delay in condemning slavery and suggesting the world is in danger of normalising the exploitation of people again, this time through AI’s reducing humanity to data in various contexts, including warfare. Pope Leo presented the encyclical in an address at the Vatican, which was attended by AI experts, including Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah.
This is not the first papal pronouncement on communications technology, but it is the one with most warnings, at least for several centuries. In 1957, Pope Pius XII produced an encyclical on communications technologies, and even appointed St Clare as the patron saint of television, notwithstanding that it can be “the source of … deep misfortune because of the singular attraction that it exerts on people’s minds.” Pope Leo, however, sees AI as a danger to humanity, beyond misfortune, because it is polarising public opinion and media narratives and using data to drive conflict.
A legal AI trinity
AI has the attention of secular and now spiritual leaders, because of its capacity to influence people and markets. And the legal market is increasingly reactive. Law firm responses to Big Tech’s incursions into legal last month follow three strategies: roll out one of the legal AI unicorns; invest in proprietary technology; or vibe-code it yourself, building on one or more of the growing number of open source (platforms).
It will be interesting to see how this legal AI trinity evolves. And to mix metaphors, it’s also not clear which of these, if any is the God Card for legal. In trading card games (ever since Yu-Gi-Oh! in the 1990s) the God Cards are the gamechangers. As well as being inherently valuable, especially if not played, rare and powerful cards warp the game around them. This is true of Big Tech’s legal-specific offerings, with Microsoft’s Word for Legal shifting the legal AI market away from point solutions predicated on Word plug-ins, and Claude for Legal offering an alternative to Harvey and Legora, which themselves are disruptors. Now DIY legal AI is shifting the paradigm again.
DIY legal AI
DIY legal AI is the latest trend to hit social media, legal tech podcasts, and even the legal press. Even though it isn’t yet clear how effective they are in terms of practical usability, they have drawn new battle lines.
MikeOSS a free, open source platform was built in two weeks by former Latham & Watkins lawyer Will Chen who claims it can fulfil much of the functionality offered by Harvey and Legora. MikeOSS was named after the Suits character Mike Ross while Harvey was named after Suits’ Harvey Specter. While MikeOSS is free, Chen also owns and maintains Lawprof, the UK’s largest online legal learning platform, which operates a fremium model.
Lavern is an open source (free) multi-agent legal system created by Antti Innanen, a tech lawyer, legal designer and law professor. Lavern is basically a law firm staffed by AI agents. You can use any combination of the 67 specialist AI agents, and/or create your own. Lavern took six months to build, and Innanen isn’t claiming that it’s a replacement for Harvey or Legora. Rather it’s a way of bringing multiple roles (not all lawyers) together in a single AI tool, that includes an intake mode, where specialist agents debate how to approach each matter. Assuming they reach agreement, an orchestrator agent creates a document which is then checked and verified by a ten-pass loop. The agent-only discussions are reminiscent of OpenClaw. As is its autonomous mode, Clawern, which like OpenClaw runs locally on your device, processing documents and pushing its outputs to messaging apps or email. While DIY legal AI is attracting a lot of attention, Innanen admits this is a work in progress and invites people to experiment with it. And so far it has 65 forks (i.e. 65 developers are working with it) and 223 stars on Github.
Jason Wilson, litigation lead at Bloomberg wrote on LinkedIn: “The economics have collapsed: Mike OSS was reportedly built in two weeks, Lavern.ai in six months. The tools—Claude, MCP, TypeScript, Supabase—are within reach of any lawyer with a long weekend and curiosity. The democratization is real and largely good. A market dominated by companies with multibillion-dollar valuations needed exactly this disruption, and small firms gain genuine capability they could not previously afford.”
Harvey AMA
MikeOSS was even mentioned in a Harvey AMA on Reddit r/legaltech last week. Harvey co-founder Winston Weinberg responded: “Mike is a great open source project, and we believe open source is good for the legal industry. But open source doesn’t mean free. It’s just the front-end. You still need to build and pay for the infrastructure underneath,” he said, explaining that law firms also need infrastructure, governance and collaboration (Harvey provides for direct client collaboration). He added that self-hosting is rarely cheaper once you factor in serving costs, maintenance and training and support.
Another unknown around DIY legal AI is how Lavern, Mike OSS and their open source equivalents will drop with law firms and their customers. But it is part of a shift towards AI as a differentiator, which explains why more firms are investing in proprietary AI models. Following the Freshfields/Anthropic deal last month, just last week US giant Kirkland & Ellis announced that they were investing $500,000 in building their own legal AI model.
The human factor
While AI may be legal tech’s God Card, when it comes to winning (trading card games and legal cases), the skill is identifying the game changer. This was played out in a judgment last week which revealed that Pinsent Masons had referred itself to the SRA having provided misleading letters to the court which had been generated by an AI solution that the firm is piloting. Perhaps it’s worth going back to the encyclical and thinking about why it is still worth keeping a human in the legal loop, if only to check AI outputs. Which might explain why AI doesn’t have a patron saint.
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Written by Joanna Goodman, tech journalist
Photo credit (Joanna): Sam Mardon
