Mike (Open-Source Legal AI)
Free, open-source legal AI platform for document review, drafting and legal research.
🔗 Visit Mike (Open-Source Legal AI)
Description
Mike is a free tool that gives a law firm the kind of AI assistant that reads contracts, researches case law, and drafts documents — the same category of help that Harvey or Legora sell for hundreds of pounds per lawyer per month — except Mike is open source, so a firm can run it themselves at no license cost.
Built by a former Latham & Watkins associate, Mike provides a chat interface with grounded citations (answers link back to the actual source document or case), matter-scoped project organization, and end-to-end contract drafting and editing. It's self-hostable and AGPL-3.0 licensed, meaning any modifications a firm makes must also remain open — a deliberate choice to keep the project from being quietly forked into a closed commercial product.
💬 Our review
The short version: Mike is a legitimate free alternative to expensive legal AI platforms, but its biggest handicap has nothing to do with features — it's called "Mike," a name with zero search visibility and easy to confuse with anything else.
On substance, it goes head-to-head with Harvey and Legora on the core use cases (document review, drafting, research with citations) at zero license cost, which matters enormously for small and mid-sized firms priced out of those platforms entirely. The catch: Harvey and Legora have raised enormous funding rounds, employ legal-domain specialists, and have been battle-tested at large firms for longer; Mike, built largely by one person, is younger and less proven at scale, and self-hosting a legal AI tool means the firm — not a vendor — is responsible for keeping citations accurate and data secure. For a small firm that can't justify Harvey's pricing, it's worth a serious pilot; a firm that needs vendor accountability and enterprise support should stick with the paid incumbents.
💰 Pricing
📊 Global score
🤖 AI-enriched data
Open-source (AGPL-3.0), zero-cost with self-hosting
Pros
Completely free vs. paid incumbents
Grounded citations
Self-hostable, full data control
Open source, no vendor lock-in
Cons
Generic, hard-to-search product name
Less proven at scale than funded competitors
Firm bears security/accuracy responsibility