If you want people to use it on the web: do not under any circumstances use the pure-canvas approach. You must use real DOM, or it will be an endless frustration that turns many people away. I’ve written about the problems quite a few times, look through https://hn.algolia.com/?type=comment&query=chrismorgan+pure+... if you’re interested. If you’re not intending it to be used via the web, don’t worry.
But it’s a general principle: the more you are implementing from scratch, the more of a mess you’re likely to be in. As one example, at IME is completely broken, completely preventing a lot of non-English usage. Even my Compose key is broken: the key sequence `Compose - >` should produce →, but instead produces “Compose->”. This is the first time I’ve seen the Compose key turn into the word “Compose”!
For serious desktop-style applications, I honestly recommend that you not use plain-Rust GUI just yet. It is definitely steadily getting there, and I’m very optimistic that there will be at least two reasonable choices available within three years, but it’s still not where I’d want it to be for an app like this yet. Web browsers are, unfortunately, typically the pragmatic choice, even for desktop-only apps.
Feedback: the UI feels like a direct reference to VSCode, which is familiar to software developers, but not to lawyers. If you're hoping this will be adopted by lawyers, I would focus on making the UX familiar to them. Look at software that they already use, and mimic those idioms insomuch as it makes sense to do so. I would also have the base web domain link to a normal home/info page, not to the demo directly. And maybe prefill the demo with some actual content (documents/etc) so people can really see what it does and how
Ha, I had the same thought a while back along a slightly different vector (legal-adjacent technical writing). I ended up writing a blog post of my wishlist of features Word has that static site generators like Hugo don't appear to, yet. [1]
I think there's a lot of money to be made in this arena, especially given that LLMs are much easier to integrate with plain text files than with Word documents.
I’ve been dreaming of a better contract writing tool for a while now.
I’m not a lawyer but I draft insurance contracts and work with reviewing lawyers closely. As a former software developer I miss version control, partial includes, conditional logic, etc. I am shocked at how poorly supported the business world is by the ubiquity of MS Word.
I’ve been experimenting with Typst now for some time and it has a lot of what I want in creating and versioning documents but I believe may be too technical to become integrated with existing workflows and the non-technical users engaged in the development process. Basically my experience is normal users tune out once you get outside of even basic MS Word.
I really want a great tool to exist but I’m afraid I’m an outlier and unique in my technical ability in this space. Nice to see others interested in such a tool.
> "Finally got sick of diffing contracts in Word and emailing PDFs back and forth"
this is the actual iceberg. forget ai clause generators and buzzwords, 99 percent of the pain is version chaos. localfirst editor is cool and imagine pairing that with proper gitstyle branching across teams. redlines you can merge without manually eyeball.
Couldn't enter Japanese into the web version. Looks like it trying to read keys directly. Copy and paste don't work. Right clicking doesn't bring up a context menu with system options so no looking up words using the locally installed dictionary. No OS level spell checking that uses the user's dictionary.
I guess all of that is TBD though I suspect based on the tech choices will be way harder than it sounds.
Congrats on the launch, really great stuff. As a software developer who has been studying (very slowly) a law degree, I can really see how products like that improve existing processes can really fill a need. I've also seen some former colleagues gain a lot of traction in a very similar legal process improvement space.
For a completely unrelated use case, I've started using it as my docx viewer on Linux, and so far it's been great (and solves one of my pain points moving from MacOS).
This looks great! I’m really stoked to see egui being used for the desktop app. While I’m not a lawyer, I was wondering about the potential for external references to cases, i.e doc1 references a case which isn’t present locally, which can then be navigated to via something like “go to definition”. Maybe something like an indexer that crossrefs on a database of legal cases? Do you have any thoughts on some other use cases? The idea of an IDE for lawyers is super cool, can’t wait to see where this goes!
One thought regarding footnotes. I often find myself searching in the reverse direction, i.e. I have a footnote, where is the superscript to which it belongs?. This is quite difficult to do by eye, so perhaps some goto reference type functionality could be useful in this case.
I wonder if textbooks and papers could be easier to understand if they had a "go to definition" functionality for technical jargon, notation, or reasoning.
Hi, good to see you respond to criticism here, too. Personally, I can't try it locally right now, and the web demo refused to load on Firefox. On Chrome, it loaded, but it's... very slow to load files when I click on them, and there is a visible delay between taking an action and seeing that action reflected in the demo.
I bet this is a WASM limitation, I work with WASM and with Rust every day (though sadly not related lol), so I know the pain to some extent. Just please but a banner at the top saying "This preview has limited performance and responsiveness. The native app doesn't have these limitations and can be downloaded here: <link>", or similar (assuming you are aware of serious performance limitations in the browser. If not, and if your native app performs the same, please use profilers to figure out whats wrong).
Really cool to see a native app instead of another Electron or browser-based tool.
I'm curious what was your experience like building this in Rust? Also, how did you find working with egui, what made you choose egui over other UI frameworks?
Hi! Tech/cyber person at a law firm here. Major concern I can see is “will this make the formatting go haywire”?
Also which kinds law practice groups would benefit them most.
Finally - how can this be collaborative ?
I like the idea! I wish I could use git / PRs to do rounds of edits on legal documents instead of whatever Word’s track changes is.
Speaking of, could we start using version control for keeping track of laws and updating old laws? It seems to me like a much better system than randomly burying in a new law that it strikes out some text from an old law.
This is pretty interesting! Did you implement the DOCX support and rich-text editor from scratch? I’d be concerned about interoperability with other editors — a semi-compatible editor losing content/comments added by other software could be a huge problem.
Just a thought: I think it would be neat if you could include one of Mathew Butterick’s fonts (https://matthewbutterick.com/), as a fellow lawyer/software developer. I don’t know how practical that is, but it’s a smallish club and they are very pretty fonts.
Congratulations on the release! I don’t have much to add, but I wanted to express how much I love hearing about people with no formal software background who identify problems in their daily lives, plan, build, and release software to address them. Best of luck!
My pottery teacher runs a law firm though, I’ll show it to her. Do you know if there are many differences in workflow or terminology between the US and UK?
Not familiar with law enough to understand how to use it. Maybe you could show some boring hours long streams of using it in the real world and we would understand
Hey guys - I really appreciate the love from Hacker News. It's a real honor to get all of these votes and comments. If you like the idea and aren't a lawyer but want to help the project move forward, please suggest Tritium to the corporate lawyers you know.
I don't know what sort of bug this is, but if I try the preview in Firefox on macOS and hit ' or " the editor inserts the word "Dead". It looks like the editor is using ctrl+z on macOS which is... a choice. On the other hand, at least it seems to treat the home/end keys normally, which is infuriatingly hard to make macOS do.
That's probably a dead key issue (one reason custom renderers for web applications are so tedious to program) but I find it very funny to have a dedicated "Dead" key. Useful for people dealing with wills a lot, I suppose!
Edit: same is true for Chrome, so it's probably a Tritium issue and not a browser issue...
Given that many lawfirms bill by the hour, are there incentives to make their work more efficient? I.e. if a firm were to adopt this tool, can they practically charge more per hour than a firm that does not?
> There are sub-par differencing products that make `patch` look like the future.
I absolutely love https://www.draftable.com/compare - it’s an incredibly intuitive presentation of diffs from arbitrary documents, with fuzzy matching even between file types. It’s great for everything from “what did my cofounder change in this version of the deck” to “how can I quickly scan to understand how these PDF documents have evolved from a much earlier version.” Be careful with data security if uploading sensitive documents, of course. But it’s as effective a general-purpose diffing tool as one can imagine.
The real leap past this would be contextual AI extracted takeaways during the review or editing process, which begs for a specialized IDE. Makes me excited to see that this space is evolving!
I was wondering why the creation of docx files does not seem to have any formatting options but just plain text? Is this not required in legal context?
It looks like code editor with symbol references. Is that all the functionality?
I expected document to be tied to some law (or part of) and use outline of that law as outline for document, and then populating document to cover all the aspects of selected law, with AI, and indicating which generated parts were reviewed by human.
My understanding working with law firms was that they are pretty bought-in to the Microsoft Office ecosystem, how well does Tritium integrate? Is the docx format fully supported? Can one person use Tritium without affecting others? Other than tabs, what does Tritium offer that two Word panes and a file browser pane tiled on screen can't cover?
I am interested in developing software in this space, so these are earnest questions and not criticism.
This seems pretty cool! I tried it out but I ran into an error that froze the entire app on the preview. Seems to be related to max pages per paragraph.
As someone who is a (current) software engineer and (former) lawyer I find this interesting. Not sure if I'm willing to bet on big uptake, though, unless it was through an acquisition by one of the big e-discovery companies.
This is really cool. I’ve recently also had an observation about the modern lawyer’s toolset: they have no idea what version control is. Lawyers email around countless duplicate copies of .docx files as their version control. “Red line” files only hold a single revision. This can definitely be improved upon.
Hey, this looks to be pretty interesting and I'm excited to see an app made with egui that doesn't look like it uses the default theme!
I have no use for this software personally but I feel like it's pretty important for me to point out the fact that in your license agreement you misspelled the name of the company as Tritium Legal Technlogies (Technl instead of Technol).
Cheers on your product. From the small showcase it seems to be extremely fast. Developers actually caring about performance brings me great joy.
Former attorney, now dev - sorry but hard pass on this. Lawyers (especially those in big law) hate using Google Docs because it’s too dissimilar to Word.. This is leaps and bounds different. The Steve Jobs mantra of customers not knowing what they want applies in a consumer scenario, not an enterprise / business scenario (where lost time / retraining = dollars lost).
I wish developers would think more as users and not “what would I like” more. I’m also pretty sure that I could count on one hand the number of lawyers that use Linux for any legal work.
There have been a few attempts to use diffing to solve redlining, you should look into why they have failed.
There have been Word add-ons that do all of this for a while now, specifically targeted at lawyers.
Why would a law firm give up Word for this? That's your competition and unlike techies they're not going to waste time on an MVP, they want and need a finished product.
There should be a "build" button that pulled all the legal codes for the target jurisdiction and other legally binding documents and checked if everything checks out.
And to achieve this you would have to create a machine readable format for legal documents, and have a library of them already converted to it.
Then you could have a linter that highlighted that you made a logical mistake or did something wrong from the perspective of a legal guy.
Show HN: Tritium – The Legal IDE in Rust
(tritium.legal)256 points by piker 12 June 2025 | 140 comments
Comments
But it’s a general principle: the more you are implementing from scratch, the more of a mess you’re likely to be in. As one example, at IME is completely broken, completely preventing a lot of non-English usage. Even my Compose key is broken: the key sequence `Compose - >` should produce →, but instead produces “Compose->”. This is the first time I’ve seen the Compose key turn into the word “Compose”!
For serious desktop-style applications, I honestly recommend that you not use plain-Rust GUI just yet. It is definitely steadily getting there, and I’m very optimistic that there will be at least two reasonable choices available within three years, but it’s still not where I’d want it to be for an app like this yet. Web browsers are, unfortunately, typically the pragmatic choice, even for desktop-only apps.
Good luck!
I think there's a lot of money to be made in this arena, especially given that LLMs are much easier to integrate with plain text files than with Word documents.
[1]: https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/til-site/posts/things-word-h...
I’m not a lawyer but I draft insurance contracts and work with reviewing lawyers closely. As a former software developer I miss version control, partial includes, conditional logic, etc. I am shocked at how poorly supported the business world is by the ubiquity of MS Word.
I’ve been experimenting with Typst now for some time and it has a lot of what I want in creating and versioning documents but I believe may be too technical to become integrated with existing workflows and the non-technical users engaged in the development process. Basically my experience is normal users tune out once you get outside of even basic MS Word.
I really want a great tool to exist but I’m afraid I’m an outlier and unique in my technical ability in this space. Nice to see others interested in such a tool.
this is the actual iceberg. forget ai clause generators and buzzwords, 99 percent of the pain is version chaos. localfirst editor is cool and imagine pairing that with proper gitstyle branching across teams. redlines you can merge without manually eyeball.
I guess all of that is TBD though I suspect based on the tech choices will be way harder than it sounds.
For a completely unrelated use case, I've started using it as my docx viewer on Linux, and so far it's been great (and solves one of my pain points moving from MacOS).
1: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/10/30.19
I bet this is a WASM limitation, I work with WASM and with Rust every day (though sadly not related lol), so I know the pain to some extent. Just please but a banner at the top saying "This preview has limited performance and responsiveness. The native app doesn't have these limitations and can be downloaded here: <link>", or similar (assuming you are aware of serious performance limitations in the browser. If not, and if your native app performs the same, please use profilers to figure out whats wrong).
I'm curious what was your experience like building this in Rust? Also, how did you find working with egui, what made you choose egui over other UI frameworks?
Speaking of, could we start using version control for keeping track of laws and updating old laws? It seems to me like a much better system than randomly burying in a new law that it strikes out some text from an old law.
IANAL: idk if lawyers dont do pdfs but tried some research papers and PDF rendering could use some love (MacOS)
This beautiful software that looks a bit like VS Code, what did you use to make it? I'm guessing Tauri but curious if you used something else.
My pottery teacher runs a law firm though, I’ll show it to her. Do you know if there are many differences in workflow or terminology between the US and UK?
e.g. to understand Terms of Use, finance and purchase agreements, that sort of thing?
That's probably a dead key issue (one reason custom renderers for web applications are so tedious to program) but I find it very funny to have a dedicated "Dead" key. Useful for people dealing with wills a lot, I suppose!
Edit: same is true for Chrome, so it's probably a Tritium issue and not a browser issue...
I'd love to run a demo for you or your legal team.
Given that many lawfirms bill by the hour, are there incentives to make their work more efficient? I.e. if a firm were to adopt this tool, can they practically charge more per hour than a firm that does not?
I absolutely love https://www.draftable.com/compare - it’s an incredibly intuitive presentation of diffs from arbitrary documents, with fuzzy matching even between file types. It’s great for everything from “what did my cofounder change in this version of the deck” to “how can I quickly scan to understand how these PDF documents have evolved from a much earlier version.” Be careful with data security if uploading sensitive documents, of course. But it’s as effective a general-purpose diffing tool as one can imagine.
The real leap past this would be contextual AI extracted takeaways during the review or editing process, which begs for a specialized IDE. Makes me excited to see that this space is evolving!
I am interested in developing software in this space, so these are earnest questions and not criticism.
This does not benefit your customers in any way.
It does not benefit their clients, either.
And brain activity around it is a distraction from what your business does.
At best.
Good luck.
I have no use for this software personally but I feel like it's pretty important for me to point out the fact that in your license agreement you misspelled the name of the company as Tritium Legal Technlogies (Technl instead of Technol).
Cheers on your product. From the small showcase it seems to be extremely fast. Developers actually caring about performance brings me great joy.
I wish developers would think more as users and not “what would I like” more. I’m also pretty sure that I could count on one hand the number of lawyers that use Linux for any legal work.
There have been a few attempts to use diffing to solve redlining, you should look into why they have failed.
The "Fetch Example" button on the web demo doesn't seem to work. It would be nice if the web demo was pre-loaded with some stuff.
Why would a law firm give up Word for this? That's your competition and unlike techies they're not going to waste time on an MVP, they want and need a finished product.
And to achieve this you would have to create a machine readable format for legal documents, and have a library of them already converted to it.
Then you could have a linter that highlighted that you made a logical mistake or did something wrong from the perspective of a legal guy.