Last week, Will Chen released MikeOSS, an open-source project on GitHub that claims to be feature-equivalent to Harvey and Legora. Among other things, MikeOSS has an assistant, a tabular review function, and reusable workflows. While it’s too early to tell how strong the technology is, the response in the development community has been viral.
For those less familiar, the software industry values sharing and encourages collaboration. They create and share versions of software known as open source. There are open source operating systems, programming languages, databases, and encryption algorithms. You name it. Even Google’s mobile platform and Meta’s Facebook user-experience technology are open source.
The MikeOSS release highlights a few points. You don’t have to be a software engineer to write code anymore. AI coding using Claude Code or other tools can be accomplished via well-articulated prompts, and the cost of developing feature equivalent software has just decreased by one or two orders of magnitude. The barriers to creating feature equivalent software products have just been lowered.
Legal Industry Struggles To Share
Recently, I saw a demo for a document assembly product. It transparently codified all the rules about legal tasks in a way anyone could easily understand.
Imagine each step of the recipe for a legal task laid out so that an associate has all the know-how to please the firm’s partner. They can mix the right amount of ingredients at the right time to make the perfect meal just as the partner wants. Sounds great. But lawyers are hesitant to share, and this has long been a barrier to adoption in the document assembly category.
Structural incentives such as origination credit, client portability, and client confidentiality create motivations that run counter to sharing in a partnership model. This can cause attorneys to protect their know-how, or “secret sauce,” to maintain their edge, even when it’s in the firm’s best interest to share it. Sharing too much know-how with motivated associates or others can be perceived as training competition for billable time.
Open Source Changes The Build Versus Buy Equation
MikeOSS creates a lot of excitement. It’s the symbol of yet another technology shift that will benefit the legal industry and create more options. The build-versus-buy equation just shifted more towards build.
Corporations will consider building their own in-house solutions, as will law firms.
Competition is going to get spicier for sure, but that doesn’t mean current vendors won’t embrace the same newly enabled open-source collaboration. As software chefs, they will need to adopt the new equipment available in the kitchen and begin baking new features at an accelerated pace.
Using Harvey and Legora as examples, they have access to the same capabilities and move with agility. This new disruption may affect their valuations and firms’ willingness to pay for their solutions, but it’s unlikely to mean their demise.
Reality Check: Building In-house Is More Than Functionality
Before anyone decides to build in-house, they should count the cost. Software purchases are more about buying a result than features.
In my opinion, user adoption is the greatest obstacle to legal technology results.
Solutions typically require implementation, integration, training, and customer support.
Client data must be secure, and what’s often missed is the need for systems to be auditable and controllable. Vendors are required to present a SOC 2 certification to demonstrate, among other things, that they have a clear release process, testing, separation of duties, and clear decision ownership. Also, beware that some corporations even restrict which open-source technologies can be used on their data. These burdens shift in-house, too.
The bottom line is: Don’t underestimate the non-feature components of the build-versus-buy decision. The process changes required to deploy homegrown systems and the political cost may be larger than meets the eye. Vendor purchases are safer politically.
Functionality isn’t the only barrier to results.
Law Firms Must Shift From Proprietary Knowledge To Orchestration
LLMs have been collecting legal know-how and increasing access to and the baseline of legal knowledge. In short, they have been collecting recipes for legal work and systematically creating secret sauces that rival any individual attorney’s proprietary know-how.
The days when an attorney can keep an edge by relying on their know-how are waning. The secret sauce isn’t going to be better than other secret sauces. MikeOSS just opened our eyes to a new category of equipment to operate the legal kitchen.
The pressure building from LLMs, coupled with a new wave of collaboration in legal technology, will force law firms to compete on different terms.
The real disruption isn’t that open-source tools can replicate Harvey or Legora. It’s that they expose how little of the competitive advantage in legal services actually comes from software features or proprietary knowledge.
As AI absorbs legal knowledge and open-source tools distribute it, the advantage shifts to those who can operationalize that knowledge securely, repeatably, and at scale.
In that world, the winners won’t be the firms with the best recipes. They’ll be the ones running the best kitchens to maintain their Michelin rating and expand trusted relationships with clients.
AI was used in the editing of this article.
Ken Crutchfield, founder and CEO of Spring Forward Consulting, has over 40 years of experience in legal, tax and other industries. Throughout his career, he has focused on growth, innovation and business transformation. His consulting practice advises investors, legal tech startups, firms, and others.
As a strategic thinker who understands markets and creating products to meet customer needs, he has worked in start-ups and large enterprises. He has served in General Management capacities in six businesses.
Ken has a pulse on the trends affecting the market. Whether it was the Internet way back in the 1980s or Generative AI, he understands technology and its impact on business.
Crutchfield started his career as an intern with LexisNexis and has worked at Thomson Reuters, Bloomberg, Dun & Bradstreet, and Wolters Kluwer. Ken has an MBA and holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from The Ohio State University.