I Built a Free AI Legal Assistant That Replaces $1,200/Month Software — and Open-Sourced It

Law firms are hemorrhaging money on AI tools they barely control. Harvey AI? ~$1,200/user/month. CoCounsel? Hundreds more. And every one of them sends your most sensitive client documents to someone else's cloud. I got tired of watching that happen. So I built LegalLens — a fully open-source, self-hosted AI document intelligence platform that does everything those tools do, runs on your own machine, and costs exactly $0. The Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About Picture this: A junior associate uploads a confidential M&A agreement to an AI tool to get a quick summary. The document vanishes into a third-party server farm. The firm pays $1,200 per user per month for that privilege. And if the AI hallucinates a clause that doesn't exist? There's no citation to verify it. This isn't hypothetical. It's the current state of legal AI. Attorney-client privilege. Trade secrets. Sealed settlement terms. These aren't files you casually hand to a SaaS product. But the alternative — doing it all manua