The legal profession has a trust problem with artificial intelligence, and for good reason. For months, headlines have been littered with stories of lawyers submitting briefs filled with AI-generated case citations that turned out to be completely fictional. Hallucinated court decisions, invented precedents, and phantom judges—these aren’t just embarrassing mistakes, they can derail entire cases and destroy professional reputations. Enter OpenJuris, a newcomer that launched on Hacker News this week and is already turning heads for tackling this exact problem head-on.
OpenJuris is an AI-powered legal research platform built on a deceptively simple premise: every answer it provides must be traceable to an actual legal source. The tool connects large language models directly to case law databases, with built-in citation verification that ensures every referenced case exists and every quoted passage is accurate. When you ask OpenJuris a question about federal or state law, it doesn’t just generate a plausible-sounding response based on training data—it pulls from real court decisions, statutes, and regulations, then shows you exactly where it found the information.
The platform offers three main features that work together to create a comprehensive research experience. Research Chat functions as your starting point for complex legal questions, delivering thorough answers backed by real-time research and verifiable citations. Every claim comes with a source link, so you can immediately check the primary source yourself rather than taking the AI’s word for it. For deeper investigation, Case Chat lets you engage with individual court decisions through an elegantly designed interface that displays multiple opinions side by side, complete with AI-generated headnotes that maintain the same rigorous citation standards. The platform even highlights relevant text passages within opinions, allowing you to select specific sections and ask targeted follow-up questions without losing context.
What makes OpenJuris particularly noteworthy is the team behind it. Will Chen, a former associate at Latham & Watkins—one of the world’s most prestigious law firms—brings firsthand understanding of how lawyers actually work and what they need from research tools. He’s joined by Zach Zhao, whose engineering background includes stints at Robinhood and Duolingo, bringing consumer-tech sensibilities to a traditionally stodgy industry. This combination of legal expertise and technical execution shows in the product’s thoughtful design decisions, from the clean case-reading interface to the careful attention given to citation accuracy.
The timing of OpenJuris’s launch couldn’t be more relevant. Legal AI has reached an inflection point where adoption is accelerating, but so are the horror stories. Lawyers desperately want the efficiency gains that AI promises—faster research, better pattern recognition, more comprehensive analysis—but they can’t afford the risk of citing non-existent cases. The Hacker News community, typically skeptical of AI hype, responded to OpenJuris with genuine interest precisely because it addresses a real pain point rather than simply riding the AI wave.
Of course, OpenJuris isn’t claiming to replace lawyers or eliminate the need for human judgment. The platform includes clear disclaimers that its answers aren’t legal advice, and the founders seem to understand that their tool works best when it augments rather than replaces legal expertise. A lawyer still needs to read the underlying cases and apply critical thinking to the analysis—but having accurate, verified citations as a foundation makes that work significantly more reliable.
For legal professionals who have been watching the AI revolution from the sidelines, waiting for tools that won’t compromise their ethical obligations, OpenJuris represents a promising development. It suggests that the future of legal AI might not be about replacing human lawyers, but about giving them better tools to do what they already do—just faster and with greater confidence that the sources they’re citing actually exist.
The platform is currently available to try at openjuris.org, with a free tier for individual users and enterprise features planned for law firms. Whether it can challenge the established legal research giants remains to be seen, but it’s certainly earned its moment in the spotlight on Hacker News.
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