Lavern

A multi-agent legal system. Apache 2.0.

A team of 67 agent prompts (specialists plus orchestrators) coordinating through a debate protocol. The system reads documents, posts findings with cited evidence, runs three layers of verification, and pauses at a human gate before critical decisions land. Runs against Anthropic, Mistral (EU), or fully local via Ollama.

Built by a law firm founder over six months because the prevailing "AI as a junior associate" framing felt like the wrong analogy to start from. Whether this is the right one is what we're publishing to find out.

Watch the demo → · lavern.ai · Architecture deep-dive → · Quick Start →

This is not a product. Lavern is best understood as a collection of ideas in one repo. A polished demo of how we could build in the future.

You can criticise it for not working as a "product". That misses the mark. It is not meant to be a product. It is a source of inspiration.

It is at least ten things, several of which are, on their own, products somebody could build a company around. They are sitting in the repo. Take whichever ones you want.

What is and isn't stress-tested. The architecture is real and the code is open. The pipeline runs, the agents debate, the verification loops fire, the precedent board persists, the tests pass. What hasn't been independently validated is the quality bar: whether all this machinery produces materially better outputs than a well-prompted single LLM on a representative sample of real legal work. We have internal evaluation; we don't have a public benchmark. Treat the engineering as the contribution and the legal-quality claims as a hypothesis.

Install

macOS / Linux:

curl -fsSL lavern.ai/install.sh | sh

Windows (PowerShell):

irm lavern.ai/install.ps1 | iex

Either script clones the repo, installs backend and frontend dependencies, and gives you a lavern command. The 60-second walkthrough is in QUICKSTART.md.

By hand:

git clone https://github.com/AnttiHero/lavern.git
cd lavern
npm install
(cd viz && npm install)

Then:

npm run serve:dev          # API server on :3000 (LOCAL MODE, no API key needed)
cd viz && npm run dev      # Dashboard on :5173, hot reload
open http://localhost:5173

Demo mode runs the dashboard, the Clawern view, and the cinematic guided tour without an API key. To run real engagements, add ANTHROPIC_API_KEY (or MISTRAL_API_KEY for the EU provider) to .env. It's auto-created from .env.example on first run.

What's in the box