Scissero Launches Suzie Law Open-Source AI Assistant

Scissero has launched ‘Suzie Law’, an open-source AI assistant to help lawyers with needs such as drafting and knowledge search, with the ability to ‘adapt the system to their own practice areas’. The move comes shortly after Will Chen launched an open-source legal AI platform called Mike.

CEO Mathias Strasser told Artificial Lawyer: ‘Suzie Law is intended to be cloned, modified, and adapted by the legal community.

‘It is built in collaboration with Team Suzie (see more below), which provides the reusable agent loop, chat shell, document tooling, persona system, knowledge-base runtime, and UI primitives; and Scissero, whose lawyers have contributed the legal perspective and deep domain expertise.’

He also noted: ‘Baseline legal AI should be free. Clients and legal teams should have access to a capable starting point comparable with what is available in the market.’

However, Strasser added: ‘Scissero has differentiated, and will continue to differentiate, above that base layer with additional proprietary tools and services for the areas in which it has market-leading skills, particularly document drafting and markups, data extraction, and obligations management.’

In short: you get the ‘legal AI starter pack’ and then can go to the main business for more complex needs.

Readers may also remember that Scissero was the UK-based legal tech company / ALSP, that brought aboard a big chunk of Robin AI after it closed.

And here’s an AL interview with Strasser.

Who are Team Suzie? The people from Robin?

No. Team Suzie is a separate project I started to make vibe coding accessible to domain experts.

Even with tools like Claude Code – which are genuinely empowering – it can still take weeks to build a serious application, and the result often has gaps around structure, security, and scalability. Team Suzie aims to provide a free, open-source base layer that lets experts in any field ship useful applications in as little as an afternoon.

Suzie Law is the legal reference application built on that platform. The goal was to include many of the core features you see in tools like Harvey and Legora (without claiming feature parity), so that lawyers have a practical starting point for building their own software.

This reflects the reality that we’re entering a world where domain experts can build their own tools.  And it is, in fact, how we now work at Scissero. We enable our lawyers to build tools around their own workflows. The idea is simple: no one understands those workflows better than the lawyers themselves, and no platform is better suited to automating them than an open, extensible base layer that already includes the common building blocks.

It’s a different approach from what most people do (although Freshfields’ recent partnership with Anthropic may point in a similar direction), but it has clear advantages.

By open-sourcing the base layer, we’re not giving away the real source of value – the value comes from what gets built on top of it. For us, this is a way of showing the world how we work in practice.  And we believe this approach ultimately benefits clients.

At the same time, the project highlights a limitation of the current legal AI market, which is still focused on thin chat interfaces, with limited ability to develop deeper, workflow-driven systems that meaningfully change how legal work is done.

Who do you see as the main competitors in this space?

There are a few other open-source initiatives, but relatively few are explicitly designed for extensibility. Suzie Law works as a standalone application, but it’s really intended as a foundation – a shell that can be extended quickly using tools like Claude Code to solve specific, domain-level problems.

Thanks Mathias.

You can find more about Suzie Law here.

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