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LegalMemory

What is LegalMemory?

LegalMemory is an open-source, on-premises knowledge index for law firms. It continuously syncs the firm’s document estate (DMS libraries, cloud drives, practice-management systems, mailboxes, chat) into a shadow index: the sources are only ever read, never modified, and every document’s source permissions are mirrored alongside its content.

On top of that index, LegalMemory does more than embed and retrieve:

  • Every document becomes structured data. An insertion pipeline converts each file (including OCR for scans), classifies it into a matter by reading its folder neighbourhood and searching existing matters, links related documents (draft→final version chains, annexes, referenced contracts), extracts typed metadata from final versions, and captures anonymized decision rationale from correspondence and redlines.
  • Retrieval is permission-scoped and structure-aware. Queries run as the calling person. Project grants and mirrored source ACLs are compiled into a filter that is applied before any ranking; hybrid lexical + vector legs are fused, version status decays superseded drafts, and results collapse to the best version of each document. See how retrieval works.
  • AI tools plug in over MCP. An identity-bound MCP server exposes search, matter lookup, decision records, billing queries and entity resolution to any MCP-capable client, with an append-only access ledger recording every call.

The appliance

Section titled “The appliance”

LegalMemory ships as a Docker Compose stack assembled from proven open-source components: PostgreSQL + pgvector as the system of record, OpenSearch for ACL-scoped hybrid retrieval, Docling Serve for document conversion and OCR, LiteLLM as the model gateway (cloud providers now, vLLM/TEI for air-gapped installs), Hatchet for pipeline orchestration, and Keycloak + oauth2-proxy for identity. The admin console (the product UI this documentation follows) runs on the appliance itself.

Every capability is a real service: there are no mocks, no silent fallbacks. A failing pipeline stage retries with backoff and quarantines; nothing degrades silently.

Where to go next

Section titled “Where to go next”