Harvey raised 500M for legal AI, I built the same and open sourced it

67•zztopisgreat•1h ago

Comments

postepowanieadm•1h ago

No you did not. No don't have the access to jurisprudence.

arctic-true•1h ago

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.

dominotw•1h ago

> the ability to represent to other parties that you are using a trusted provider.

so ppl trust ai if its coming from provider X ?

low_common•57m ago

No they're trusting the lawyers turned solution architects that you get when you buy Harvey.

insane_dreamer•56m ago

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

MeetingsBrowser•53m ago

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?

rvz•50m ago

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.

lp92•39m ago

Exactly. The old saying "No one got fired for buying IBM" applies here, except it's Harvey and not IBM.

mym1990•50m ago

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.

lp92•41m ago

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.

DetroitThrow•44m ago

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?

hurfdurf•44m ago

Harvey, Mike, but no Donna!?

stronglikedan•7m ago

> Harvey

> dent

nice...

freejazz•1h ago

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..

throwup238•1h ago

> CaseCite is a _source-available_, self-hosted legal RAG caselaw research & document analysis platform.

Source-available is not open source.

graemep•58m ago

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.

binarymax•48m ago

Doesn't matter. The entire thing is vibe coded, so you can just point Claude at it and say "Copy this".

stronglikedan•8m ago

You can do that even if it wasn't vibe coded. What a time to be alive!

gexla•41m ago

Recent commit...

LICENSE | Relicense under the Apache License 2.0 | 7 minutes ago

WithinReason•16m ago

too slow, already flagged

rvz•1h ago

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?

cahaya•1h ago

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.

mattfrommars•54m ago

Which LLM model actually built this? I looks very sloppy.

DetroitThrow•52m ago

This is not open source! Can we get an update to the title?

piterrro•51m ago

> I built the same and open sourced it

How can I *trust* you its true? Will you bet your money its __the same__ ?

piterrro•48m ago

27 commits, my gosh, some people are really bold in their claims.

jackschultz•49m ago

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.

lp92•37m ago

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.

mym1990•44m ago

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.

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