Product
A legal operating system, not a chatbot.
OpenLegal is a local-first intelligence platform that treats a legal practice as a living loop: files in, understanding updated continuously, research grounded, strategy debated — and every consequential action paused for a human.
What OpenLegal is
OpenLegal composes proven building blocks — a filesystem watcher, an intelligence ledger, an event fabric, a legal-issue classifier, an authority store, a research planner, a council of specialist roles, a strategy engine, and a privacy gate — into one operating system for legal work.
The value is not any single model. It is the governed pipeline: provenance on every event, hash-only auditing, fail-closed model routing, and a human approval path that keeps the loop accountable.
Product layers
From raw files to approved action, OpenLegal is organized in four layers.
Local case repository
Matter files on disk are the source of truth. The engine ingests and re-indexes on change; nothing is uploaded by default.
Observation & classification
A ledger, event fabric, and classifier turn files into structured legal issues, entities, and epistemic status.
Research, council, strategy
Research against authority with explicit gaps/risks; specialist debate; strategy options and war games.
Human-gated output
Drafts and approvals surfaced in terminal, browser, or API. The human decides; the audit trail records it.
How to work with it
Operate from the terminal
Twelve openlegal commands cover the whole surface — analyze, audit, case, doctor, evidence, health, models, privacy, run, start, status, tui.
Drive the API
A FastAPI application exposes 150+ routes — health, status, intelligence, research, council, strategy, living systems, and agents — each scriptable.
API overviewWatch the Command Center
The browser surface includes a Matter Command Center with live status, plus OpenAPI discovery for every endpoint.
Browser UIWhat OpenLegal is not
OpenLegal does not file anything, pay anyone, or take irreversible action on its own. It also does not pretend to be a licensed attorney. It is an intelligence and operations platform that organizes legal work — and it stops at your approval.
From here
Set it up in minutes
Install into a virtual environment, run openlegal doctor, and start the engine. No account, no cloud requirement.
Contribute to the project
OpenLegal is an open-source project. Its canonical repository lives on GitHub and will be public with the open-source release; the project itself runs as a local checkout today.
Contributing