> You may not move, change, disable, or circumvent the license key functionality
in the software, and you may not remove or obscure any functionality in the
software that is protected by the license key.
A lot of Harvey’s value prop is not in the underlying software - someone else came out with an “open source Harvey” (called “Mike”) months ago and it hasn’t really put a dent in uptake of Harvey or its main rival, Legora. Harvey’s value is in the infrastructure, the help integrating it into workflows, the ability to represent to other parties that you are using a trusted provider.
Yeah this reeks of never talking to the customers of these legaltech companies - on top of what you mentioned, it's also external integrations and downstream configurability for how those integrations behave.
If you view Harvey as Claude in a box for legal documents, then the Harvey/Legora competitor that will never have the "killer features" that larger firms receive from running Harvey/Legora.
These biglaw firms also have software engineering teams themselves. If Harvey was easy to remake as doing legal document RAG, why haven't they done it themselves?
Well the firms with engineering teams are most definitely exploring doing it all in-house. There is no point in having the engineering team otherwise. I'm at a midsize firm that doesn't have that kind of staff and we're definitely going to be using something in the Harvey/Legora space, primarily because its not practical for us to roll our own.
I built for a friend's law office a RAG proof of concept. It sucked. But it was there, so I could have claimed I vibe coded an entire open source legal solution right? But it still sucked, so no (and made me believe RAG is not a useful way at all for knowledge search).
This isn't that uncommon for many technologies, people and especially organizations who are procuring software look for signals that can offload perceived risk. These signals can be things as small as the formation of a company at all, or other ongoing partnerships which shows more social trust. Whether or not the company or provider is actually safe is a different conversation though.
No, they are trusting Harvy because the founders have legal/Law background and know what the customer wants. Plus the B2B contracts I'm sure they sign.
Would you rather trust sensitive legal documents with me running a self hosted app that shares data with whichever provider openrouter chooses, or Harvey?
I guess my first questions would be: what kind of background does the creator have in law to be able to steer this system to a good outcome? If they don't have a legal background, were legal experts and otherwise consulted to build this out? The fact that the creator is struggling with even understanding what open source is, makes it much harder to put any faith in this system.
I build my own take on this with https://document.bot
Build for aviation legal regulations/ compliance. Highly optimized search around large PDF's, Word, etc with offline, EU and frontier LLM options.
Friend works for a fairly large law firm on the business running side. She told me how they pay a ton for Harvey and yet, they don't even have a claude for her and those not doing legal work. They think Harvey is great and have no clue that all it does is wrap around models and have safety checks like this repo does. Some of it might be yes, that there's legal work around who gets blamed, but I see mentions of Harvey and it's a joke at what the legal industry does. I see law firms as having no clue on how things work other than paying giant contracts to places that like to schmooze them because that's what they like to do as well.
Law firms are paying because the founders were former lawyers and know what the customers want and the firms trust that pedigree. As for why they pay Harvy, its about risk exposure and management. Same reason companies pay for Security appliances and vendors rather than trying to roll their own.
Harvey has significantly more than "safety checks like this repo does" and if you don't realize that, you genuinely have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
>I see law firms as having no clue on how things work other than paying giant contracts to places that like to schmooze them because that's what they like to do as well.
Okay, yeah. Going with my second option. It's really the misplaced confidence that does it for me.
Harvey can be pretty useful and has all sorts of tailoring done to it to provide utility to legal professionals. I don't really see any of that here. Like someone else pointed out, the main benefit of Harvey is being able to say "well we used the leading legal AI provider."
Let alone the staff to get the old fogeys at my firm using it..
Just like how DocuSign should have shut down after thousands of other open source clones have spawned on GitHub? (DocuSign is still alive)
Also "source available" is not "open source". On top of that even releasing the source must mean that DocuSign and Harvey should be panicking right now. /s
Can someone please tell them that they should be scared?
> CaseCite is a _source-available_, self-hosted legal RAG caselaw research & document analysis platform.
Source-available is not open source.
Especially with clauses like this:
> You may not move, change, disable, or circumvent the license key functionality in the software, and you may not remove or obscure any functionality in the software that is protected by the license key.
Doesn't matter. The entire thing is vibe coded, so you can just point Claude at it and say "Copy this".
I feel its probably unreasonable but I do get a sense of stolen valour when I click on "I built..." and can immediately tell its vibe coded.
You can do that even if it wasn't vibe coded. What a time to be alive!
Well, technically yes, ethically no.
Recent commit...
LICENSE | Relicense under the Apache License 2.0 | 7 minutes ago
too slow, already flagged
A lot of Harvey’s value prop is not in the underlying software - someone else came out with an “open source Harvey” (called “Mike”) months ago and it hasn’t really put a dent in uptake of Harvey or its main rival, Legora. Harvey’s value is in the infrastructure, the help integrating it into workflows, the ability to represent to other parties that you are using a trusted provider.
Harvey, Mike, but no Donna!?
> Harvey
> dent
nice...
Yeah this reeks of never talking to the customers of these legaltech companies - on top of what you mentioned, it's also external integrations and downstream configurability for how those integrations behave.
If you view Harvey as Claude in a box for legal documents, then the Harvey/Legora competitor that will never have the "killer features" that larger firms receive from running Harvey/Legora.
These biglaw firms also have software engineering teams themselves. If Harvey was easy to remake as doing legal document RAG, why haven't they done it themselves?
Well the firms with engineering teams are most definitely exploring doing it all in-house. There is no point in having the engineering team otherwise. I'm at a midsize firm that doesn't have that kind of staff and we're definitely going to be using something in the Harvey/Legora space, primarily because its not practical for us to roll our own.
I built for a friend's law office a RAG proof of concept. It sucked. But it was there, so I could have claimed I vibe coded an entire open source legal solution right? But it still sucked, so no (and made me believe RAG is not a useful way at all for knowledge search).
> the ability to represent to other parties that you are using a trusted provider.
so ppl trust ai if its coming from provider X ?
This isn't that uncommon for many technologies, people and especially organizations who are procuring software look for signals that can offload perceived risk. These signals can be things as small as the formation of a company at all, or other ongoing partnerships which shows more social trust. Whether or not the company or provider is actually safe is a different conversation though.
No they're trusting the lawyers turned solution architects that you get when you buy Harvey.
No, they are trusting Harvy because the founders have legal/Law background and know what the customer wants. Plus the B2B contracts I'm sure they sign.
Yes.
Would you rather trust sensitive legal documents with me running a self hosted app that shares data with whichever provider openrouter chooses, or Harvey?
They trust the companies that already use Harvey or Legora for their legal work and nobody got fired for buying services from both of them.
But someone will risk getting fired for vibe-coding their own without the support, sales, infrastructure and engineering to recreate them.
Exactly. The old saying "No one got fired for buying IBM" applies here, except it's Harvey and not IBM.
yes, esp if you're a company
it's more like you _don't_ trust ai if it comes from provider Y, or was vibe-coded by some random dev that you've never heard of
No you did not. No don't have the access to jurisprudence.
I guess my first questions would be: what kind of background does the creator have in law to be able to steer this system to a good outcome? If they don't have a legal background, were legal experts and otherwise consulted to build this out? The fact that the creator is struggling with even understanding what open source is, makes it much harder to put any faith in this system.
I build my own take on this with https://document.bot Build for aviation legal regulations/ compliance. Highly optimized search around large PDF's, Word, etc with offline, EU and frontier LLM options.
Friend works for a fairly large law firm on the business running side. She told me how they pay a ton for Harvey and yet, they don't even have a claude for her and those not doing legal work. They think Harvey is great and have no clue that all it does is wrap around models and have safety checks like this repo does. Some of it might be yes, that there's legal work around who gets blamed, but I see mentions of Harvey and it's a joke at what the legal industry does. I see law firms as having no clue on how things work other than paying giant contracts to places that like to schmooze them because that's what they like to do as well.
Law firms are paying because the founders were former lawyers and know what the customers want and the firms trust that pedigree. As for why they pay Harvy, its about risk exposure and management. Same reason companies pay for Security appliances and vendors rather than trying to roll their own.
Harvey has significantly more than "safety checks like this repo does" and if you don't realize that, you genuinely have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
>I see law firms as having no clue on how things work other than paying giant contracts to places that like to schmooze them because that's what they like to do as well.
Okay, yeah. Going with my second option. It's really the misplaced confidence that does it for me.
> I built the same and open sourced it
How can I *trust* you its true? Will you bet your money its __the same__ ?
27 commits, my gosh, some people are really bold in their claims.
Which LLM model actually built this? I looks very sloppy.
This is not open source! Can we get an update to the title?
Harvey can be pretty useful and has all sorts of tailoring done to it to provide utility to legal professionals. I don't really see any of that here. Like someone else pointed out, the main benefit of Harvey is being able to say "well we used the leading legal AI provider."
Let alone the staff to get the old fogeys at my firm using it..
[dead]
[flagged]
Just like how DocuSign should have shut down after thousands of other open source clones have spawned on GitHub? (DocuSign is still alive)
Also "source available" is not "open source". On top of that even releasing the source must mean that DocuSign and Harvey should be panicking right now. /s
Can someone please tell them that they should be scared?