Is Building Your Own AI the New Path to Attention? Episode 51, Mike OSS Founder William Chen
The Ex-Latham Lawyer Who Built an Open Source Version of Harvey and Legora
Harvey and Legora have been very effective at capturing the attention of the Biglaw ecosystem. But now, so has Will Chen, the ex-Latham lawyer who built Mikeoss.com, an open sourced version of, you guessed it, Harvey and Legora.
Hey there, I’m Zach Abramowitz and I am Legally Disrupted, and I’m back on the road.
Before I left my studio, I recorded several podcasts, the first of which was with Will Chen. Attention is All You Need is the foundational paper about LLM architecture. But, it has also been descriptive of a major challenge in a noisy space that’s moving fast: there’s a premium put on standing out and the ability to capture attention. Will has done exactly that.
There are two things about Will’s recent notoriety that are deeply interesting to me:
Building and releasing a product is a new way to gain attention in legal. That’s super new. While most critics stop at tweeting or posting cringy safeposts on LinkedIn, Will actually used “vibe coding” tools to build a functioning application layer in just two weeks.
Taking aim at Harvey and Legora specifically. Right now, lawyer attention has been on Harvey vs. Legora with lawyers questioning both “which tool should we buy” as well as “should we build our own.” By building an open source version, Will was able to tap into the two questions lawyers are paying attention to the most and demystify both by showing, not telling.
In this episode, we talk about his goal in building the product, the news that Kirkland & Ellis is setting aside $500 million to invest in their own AI as well as Will’s advice for lawyers and law firms who want to start building AI.
My take: I don’t find myself agreeing with Will’s level of critique for Harvey and Legora. I have much more conviction that these two businesses have massive upside beyond their current valuations and have been executing at very high levels. I also reject the idea that Harvey and Legora have plans to pull the rug out from under their customers and turn into an AI first law firm.
But, I’m still impressed and intrigued by folks like Will or Jamie Tso and Raymond Sun from Legal Quants as well as the wave of other lawyer builders that aren’t content to buy off the shelf products.
Whether you’re building or buying or just trying to keep up, the podcast with Will is a great way to get further AI-pilled. If you’re into the audio only experience, you can get listen to our conversation on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify. Another way to stay ahead would be subscribing to this newsletter. Episode 52 should be out in the next day or so.
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