Harvey Legora Clone? Meet "Mike"
Open Source AI O/S for Law
One of my mutuals on X Will C just built a rather remarkable O/S tool for AI for Law.
Its very much like our 2024 vintage Jurisphere, a team effort, and yet in 2026 with the advance of AI code he did it easily, over two weeks, and claims almost anyone can do it.
Law firms are certainly learning, in many cases, the adage “built beats bought.”
If they can be done in house, cost is lower, no reliance on others, features adapted changed or dropped whenever the firm wants. (“owning the application layer”)
And, importantly, critical data remains self-custodied in-house to a greater extent, rather than shipping off to a third party vendor, which in Law is very critical.
You can also try Mike here and for free.
Says Will:
“Harvey is valued at $11B. Legora just raised at $5.5B. I built their entire web application in two weeks and I'm making it open-source and free for everyone to use. Say hi to Mike.
When I got the chance to try Harvey and Legora, I was surprised by how simple they were. A thought came to mind: I could probably build something similar in no time at all with Claude. And so I did.
Assistant, project, tabular review and workflows. You get it all without vendor lock-in.
Mike offers law firms an alternative, where they own the application layer and aren't stuck with a vendor they're renewing forever.
You can try Mike in the demo on the website, or go to the GitHub link on the site to download the code and run a local version yourself.”
Here is the demo for “Mike”
Will let me know he is a former BigLaw attorney who has also built a tool for AI legal research providing answers with verified citations in order to check for hallucination. That tool is OpenJuris.