These things normally end in tears. I wish them the best of luck. By the way Will the trend of lawyers who don’t like their high martk ups go back about 3 generations now it’s just that before the tech wasn’t in play to actually do anything about it
Will writes
In the last few months of 2025, Zach Zhao and I have been building OpenJuris – a faster, more user-friendly, and AI-integrated Westlaw that is free to use.
Recently there has been a trend of lawyers like Jamie Tso who are tired of the high markups that legaltech firms have been charging for their products, and have taken the matter into their own hands by ‘vibe coding’ features from the Harvey, Legora etc. This at once revealed that the features might not be as advanced and complex as claimed to be, and that with the advent of AI, legal software can, and should be more accessible in terms of both usability and pricing.
Zach and I decided to place our attention on building a better, faster and more accessible version of the most expensive and most important piece of legal software of all: Westlaw/Lexis.
We have built OpenJuris, which gives you access to US federal and state case law in a beautiful reader with a clean and readable interface, with tabs for each opinion, as well as the ability to “chat with” the case to obtain responses with citations of the case content. (Will demo this in a separate post)
We have also built an AI research chat that parallels Westlaw’s CoCounsel (formerly Casetext) and Lexis+AI. It provides AI-generated responses to legal questions that are grounded by citations to real cases. And when you click on the case, you can see quotes that back up each proposition in the AI response. (See video demo below)
The tool is not perfect, it’s still in the early stages. Our goal is ultimately to build a professional, enterprise-grade software that that is accessible everyone, because we believe that the law should be transparent. Please help us by giving it a try and we would love to hear any feedback. The app is free to use!
Screenshot
