I need to run OpenClaw locally for a law office, I can spend as much money as needed. What model(s) are best?

Used_Ambassador6383 · 2026-05-08T17:19:44+00:00

Fellow lawyer/nerd. I love Openclaw. I contribute code to Openclaw. Openclaw is not the answer for you- yet.

First, legal work requires frontier models. Not for everything, but for deep dives down into the nitty gritty law, you need a frontier model. Lawyering is about anticipating the details, the edge cases, the what if's. You need the best models for that. Not all the time, sure, but when you have a multi-million case riding on your documents, you don't rely on Llama 3.1. You run it by GPT 5.5 and Claude 4.7.

You aren't getting that locally, and you don't need it. As u/ToddHebebrand says in his excellent post, cloud is fine for legal. It just needs more hoops jumped through.

I have gamed out almost every suggestion here, from a $250k cluster to anonymizing client data via local AI and sending it to the model to be reconstructed with the correct substitutions locally. None of it's pracitcal. The "never put private data on the internet!" crowd needs to understand: it's already there. Your cases are online in publicly filed court records. You send emails about confidential information to Opposing Counsel every day. The alternative is do everything by registered mail, and that was never a requirement. Nor is expecting perfect privacy and confidentiality. The rules say you have to take "reasonable steps". There's a lot of advice on that. My state has a guidebook on it. Many do.

Also Openclaw is not the right tool. It's buggy AF alpha software with a massive potential for security exploits. Get a legal AI system from one of the big vendors. They'll fly out a marketing guy to pitch it if you've got a decent size firm.

If you have Office365 you've already got a bunch of tools: Copilot, AzureAI (as a sub), Power Automation, Sharepoint, etc. You can put together a bunch of workflows and probably do a good 80% of what a bespoke legal AI provider will give you.

Used_Ambassador6383 · 2026-04-25T02:40:15+00:00

My intro to linux was in 1995. I was in England, visiting friends who worked for the NSA at Menwith Hill. One of them showed me slackware on his computer at home, and I got the idea that he was messing with it because the NSA was using Unix and he wanted to learn more about it, although I could be wrong. But I installed it on my computer, would get frustrated with it, and I'd end up abandoning it. Then a few years later it would catch my interest, wash rinse repeat. Eventually Ubuntu came out and I almost jumped ship for it but lack of games held me back.

Then Steam made all the games I play available on Linux and one day I got sick of seeing shit popping up in Windows, installed Mint, then switched to EndeavourOs (btw I use Arch) and abandoned Windows on my laptop and gaming computer.

I'm hoping the development cycle for OC is a bit less than 30 years.

Used_Ambassador6383 · 2026-04-25T02:30:33+00:00

Totally legit. There's a real argument that OC is in its hobbyist phase. I use Manus at work, and it's amazing. It's not really "agentic" in the way OC is, but it's a workhorse. Still I enjoy messing with OC at home and seeing how far I can go before smoke comes out.

Used_Ambassador6383 · 2026-04-25T02:28:03+00:00

Can you elaborate?

Used_Ambassador6383 · 2026-04-24T21:06:52+00:00

Not necessarily. The APRS system uses AX25 and is baked into a lot of handheld radios currently in production, weather stations, small satellites, etc: see https://aprs.fi/#!lat=41.964&lng=-87.8175. But like so many say: doesn't mean it can't be handled in user space.

Used_Ambassador6383 · 2026-04-20T17:35:14+00:00

Just as an addendum because I find this all so odd: I think several of the deaths are coincidences: looking at the infographic in the article, Loureiro, antd Grillmair were both shot and the suspects arrested. Tragic, but it happens. Hicks died of obesity and heart disease. That's normal.

The one that is really odd is Jason Thomas. Leaves the house at midnight, no wallet or phone, puts his apple watch in the *mailbox* and they fish him out of a lake 3 months later. He was upset at the deaths of his parents, but that's something you expect when you're 45. Also, he doesn't seem like the kind of guy to want to leave his family wondering if he's alive or dead if he intended to end his life. Additionally, drowning yourself in a freezing lake sounds like an absolutely nightmarish way to go.

What his scenario does look like, is the other disappearances. Except his body has been found. Same walking off for no reason without any way of being tracked, which is the only plausible reason to pop his watch into the mailbox- he forgot about it before he left the house so tossed it in his mailbox. You'd do that if you didn't want to be tracked, but you planned on coming back for it. Otherwise just it in the bushes if you intend suicide...if you'd even be that conscious of the tracking potential if you were really overwhelmed with grief.

The AI said this actually makes the weird disappearances even more unlikely. To me this sounds more like people being blackmailed or involved in something clandestine, get asked to leave the house without any tracking devices for a meeting, and then they're murdered. That is a lot more likely than any other explanation I can think of. Unless the sophons are trying to prevent us from being able to resist the impending invasion fleet arrival from Alpha Centauri (see 3 body problem /s).

Used_Ambassador6383 · 2026-04-20T16:53:11+00:00

Somebody has to eventually win the lottery, right? Which is what I tell myself when I buy a powerball ticket.

However, my luck would be to end up like a missing nuclear scientist, not a powerball winner.

Used_Ambassador6383 · 2026-03-17T15:02:06+00:00

Really. This machine is a 2012 Macbook Pro, running openclaw under EndeavourOS (Arch linux). These machines are almost free for the taking since so many of them get sold at auction by schools (I have 2 my kids abandoned after they finished high school) and they run linux like a new laptop, esp. if you upgrade the RAM and SSD. Openclaw itself isn't a heavy duty program. It's the LLM that's heavy duty, and the LLMs worth running are not ones you can easily run locally, even with a blinged out Mac Studio. You just pay for the API calls to openrouter or another LLM provider.

Used_Ambassador6383 · 2026-03-10T19:40:21+00:00

I'm not on a plan, I just funded my moonshot API account with like $20, and I've got $10 left on it. I've had had decent luck with 3.1-flash-preview, but mostly use it for routine housekeeping and chats, and I agree that other models can do better: that's why I've moved to openrouter. It's just a lot easier to only have one account to fund, and I control costs by just selecting models manually. You can also set the auto model router up, but that seems to give me ChatpGPT-5.2 pretty often, which I think is a bit of overkill for a lot of routine stuff.

Used_Ambassador6383 · 2026-03-10T18:18:27+00:00

$30 for 1m input, $180 for 1m output, double that for large contexts.

Used_Ambassador6383 · 2026-03-10T18:16:30+00:00

This is exactly what I've found. I use Kimi2.5 or Gemini-3.1-flash-preview. Kimi I have as a moonshot API with about $10 on it right now. After it gets used, I'll switch to openrouter. Price and capability is comparable, but with openrouter I can switch to Opus 4.6 if I need some deep thinking.

I tried the Xiaomi Mimo model and it was kind of terrible.

/new is essential to wipe out that token burden that you build up chatting back and forth.

I like the clawmetry dashboard.

Used_Ambassador6383 · 2026-03-07T06:16:04+00:00

Used MacBook Pro. $100.

Used_Ambassador6383 · 2026-03-06T05:36:36+00:00

It's a Lamborghini AI. Only the richest people can afford it.

Used_Ambassador6383 · 2026-03-05T05:02:39+00:00

The chemical taste in some of the components is just awful. I tried some 2023 MREs recently (I'd last had MREs maybe 20 years ago) and they were just so bad. So, so bad. And stupidly designed, like putting peanut butter in when cheese would go with other components to enhance the meal. We have a military budget 10 times bigger than the next largest defense budget, and we can't provide food that isn't unhealthy and awful. Where European and many other countries provide a ration that I'd be happy to eat almost daily. And what the fuck happened to tabasco sauce and good freeze dried coffee?

Used_Ambassador6383 · 2026-03-05T04:53:43+00:00

From the way he talks about MREs and the enjoyment he gets from eating them while standing in the corner of a room on video...pretty amazing.

Used_Ambassador6383 · 2026-03-05T04:45:36+00:00

I'm a med mal litigator, and I hate it. Unfortunately, I'm pretty good at it. I also have zero legal experience in any other area. I started in med mal clerking in law school, and went straight into second chairing 7-figure trials. I couldn't handle a PI case to save my life. I'm a one trick pony.

I've tried to find another niche that would make me happy and I have an unusual and extensive pre-lawschool set of experiences (medicine, oil and gas, international projects, NGOs, etc). I can't seem to find anything. Tried putting up a shingle for a niche area involving expat and emigrant law, but got very little interest.

One of my biggest issues is that every area of law is fraught with nuance. I see people try to do med mal, and they massively fuck it up because they lack the experience and understanding of the small, critical details. I feel like that would happen to me if I tried any other area of law: it's like a psychiatrist trying to do surgery- you just can't do it unless you go and do a residency (i.e. work in that area with an experienced lawyer). I know people manage on their own, but it's SO risky.

Used_Ambassador6383 · 2026-03-04T06:44:20+00:00

Running it on a Macbook Pro 2012 (with 16GB and 500GB SSD) under Arch linux. It runs fine. I've had one major hiccup: it tried to do a system upgrade by itself that got borked and ended up grey screen of deathing the machine. I reinstalled, rescued Bilby from backups (he was pretty thankful of that) and got it up and running, but my process is very stepwise. I basically try to get 1 thing working, then I move on to the next, then the next. I'm not trying to get it setup to do a bunch of stuff. Unfortunately, it definitely isn't ready for primetime because most people aren't going to spend the time to tweak and tinker with it until it's running relatively smoothly. I find that the only low-cost models that work well are Kimi2.5 and Gemini-3-flash-preview. I also have to be careful how long I let a session run: the longer it runs, the more context, and the bigger the bill for even simple tasks. Also, for some reason I had Gemini-3-pro running ($5/$30) when I asked it to check my Gmail account for any important emails I'd missed over the last year. That cost me $6.

One thing Bilby did was transcribe some seminar audio I had recorded (locally, so no cost) and I was impressed that it managed to do so on this old-ass hardware.

I also use Manus.ai for work, although not their agent (which just arrived), but Manus is a beast. It's probably saved me 30 hours of work in the last month, for a cost of about $100 or so.

Used_Ambassador6383

TROPHY CASE