Open tools · Real legal work
Open Source Lawyer is a practical guide to using free, scriptable tools in legal practice — drafting documents in Markdown and turning PDF files into something you can actually work with.
Pandoc · Tesseract OCR · qpdf · Git · SQLite — all free, all local, all yours.
Focus Areas
Most of the repetitive grind in legal practice comes down to two things: producing documents, and working through the other side’s papers.
Write pleadings, briefs, and letters in plain text — then convert them to court-ready Word documents in a single command.
Stop treating PDFs as pictures. Extract, search, and manipulate them programmatically — across an entire production, in one pass.
The Toolbox
Everything used in the workflows here is open source, free, and runs on your own machine.
Converts Markdown to Word, PDF, and more — the backbone of drafting.
The OCR engine that turns scanned pages into searchable text.
Split, merge, repair, and renumber PDF files from the command line.
Version control for every draft — a full history of how a document evolved.
A local, full-text-searchable index of your document production.
The glue that automates the repetitive work between the other tools.
Why Open Source
Documents live in plain text and open formats. No subscriptions, no proprietary files, and no vendor holding your own work hostage.
Every tool in the toolbox costs nothing. The only expense is a little time to learn — time you get back many times over.
If a task takes more than a few clicks, it can be automated. One command can process a thousand pages exactly the way you would.
The Workflow
A simple, repeatable pipeline that keeps documents clean and consistent every time.
Write in Markdown. Plain text — fast to edit, easy to review, and under version control.
Pandoc turns the draft into a formatted Word document using your own templates.
OCR and index the other side’s production. Find every page that matters in seconds.
Clean, consistent, court-ready documents — every single time.
Step-by-step walkthroughs for lawyers — templates, scripts, and checklists. This site grows as each guide ships.
Guides arriving soon