Former Latham Lawyer Built Mike OSS to Challenge Harvey's $11B Valuation
A former Latham lawyer cloned two multibillion-dollar legal AI products in two weeks using Claude, and released the whole stack under AGPL v3.
PRO- Ex-Latham lawyer Will Chen released MikeOSS, an open-source clone of Harvey and Legora.
- Built in two weeks by prompting Claude, hit 1,000+ stars and 300+ forks in 72 hours.
- Features: chat, document editing with tracked changes, tabular review, workflows, CourtListener citations, Word add-in.
- Stack is Next.js, Express, Supabase, and R2-compatible storage, deployed via Docker Compose.
- Self-hostable with Claude, Gemini, OpenAI, or fully local via Ollama, licensed AGPL v3.
- Targets small and mid-sized firms priced out of Harvey ($11B) and Legora ($5.5B) contracts.
A former Latham & Watkins associate has dropped an open-source clone of the two hottest products in legal tech on GitHub, and the repo is being treated less as a side project than as a stress test for the entire category. Will Chen, an Oxford law graduate and former Latham & Watkins lawyer, built Mike OSS in two weeks and released it for free. It replicates the core capabilities of Harvey and Legora, and has become one of the fastest-growing legal tech projects ever published.
Context sharpens the stakes. Harvey, founded in 2022 and now used by more than 100,000 lawyers across 1,300 organizations, closed a $200M round at an $11 billion valuation in March 2026. Stockholm-based Legora brought its Series D to $600 million in equity at a post-money valuation of $5.6 billion. Chen's argument is that the web app powering both companies is not the moat their valuations imply, and he shipped source code to back the claim.
What ships in the repo
Mike is an assistant that creates, edits, and reviews documents using Claude or Gemini. It includes a projects vault for uploading and sharing files with colleagues, tabular review for bulk analysis, and workflows that store instructions for the assistant or presets for tabular review.
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