A small law firm runs its whole business on free software

A lawyer in England has run his whole firm on free software for around five years, and he has now published an updated list of exactly what he uses. Neil Brown runs decoded.legal, a small firm focused on internet, telecoms and tech law. His post drew 131 points and 61 comments on Hacker News.

What the setup looks like

His main laptop is a ThinkPad running Debian, a free operating system, in place of Windows or macOS. For documents he uses LibreOffice Writer when he needs a Word file to swap with other lawyers. For PDFs he uses separate free tools to read, mark up and edit them. He says the firm aims to be paperless.

On the business side, the firm hosts its own tools instead of renting them. Invoices come from InvoicePlane, and clients never touch it. Case tracking runs on EspoCRM. Policies and procedures live in a wiki called dokuwiki. The website is a simple static site. Apart from Signal, everything on the server side is self-hosted, mostly on small Intel NUC computers.

How client data is protected

Several choices are about privacy and security.

• Client files are encrypted with Cryptomator before Syncthing syncs them.
• Passwords sit in a Bitwarden-compatible server the firm runs itself, called vaultwarden.
• YubiKeys, small physical security keys, guard the more sensitive logins.
• A WireGuard VPN and a vulnerability scanner, OpenVAS, round out the setup.

The rough spots

Brown is open about the downsides. His laptop has a hardware fault: its USB-C ports charge fine but are very flaky for data, so he may have to replace it. He has no idea which laptop he would buy next. On his phone, a Pixel running GrapheneOS, he says Android does not thrill him, given Google's direction. He has tried other phone systems, including postmarketOS, Ubuntu Touch and SailfishOS, and found nothing that does what he needs better.

He also notes that many of his clients use Microsoft or Apple software, so the firm has to work alongside it.

What it means for you

The post shows that a small team can avoid software subscriptions and keep its data in its own hands. It also shows the price. Brown says he is very comfortable in a terminal, the text-only screen where commands are typed, and many of his tools rely on it. Without that comfort, or someone to maintain the servers, this route takes real effort. The material does not say what the setup costs or how much time it takes.