The Case for Open Source
When we talk about access to justice, we are talking about infrastructure. Courts, legal aid offices, duty counsel programs — these are infrastructure. They exist because society decided that justice is too important to be available only to those who can pay.
AI legal tools should be the same.
Proprietary AI and the Access Paradox
The irony of proprietary legal AI is striking: tools built to democratize legal knowledge, locked behind paywalls that exclude the people who need them most. If the goal is access to justice, the tools that deliver it cannot themselves be inaccessible.
This is the access paradox, and it is why justack.ai is open source.
How We Think About Licensing
We use Apache 2.0 for our core tools — the most permissive widely-used open source license. This means anyone can use, modify, and distribute our code. Law schools can build on it. Legal aid organizations can deploy it. Other developers can improve it.
Our commercial products — the tools we sell to legal professionals — fund the development of the open source tools. The commercial side funds the mission. The open source side fulfils it.
What Open Source Means in Practice
It means our code is on GitHub. It means our roadmap is public. It means if we disappear tomorrow, the tools survive. It means the community can audit, improve, and adapt the technology for contexts we never imagined.
This is not just a business model. It is a commitment to the principle that access to justice infrastructure should be a public good.