The Usus product
The daily machinery and legal work of a small firm, in one system
Matters remain at the center, but a firm needs more than a matter list. Usus is being built to connect the practice, the business, and supervised AI-assisted legal work without turning custom needs into second-class data.
Release status
What early access is intended to prove
The first standalone release is focused on matters, contacts, local documents, calendar, time tracking, and templates. Business operations, automation, migration, and local AI will expand as their workflows and safeguards are validated. Team sync, roles, and connected services follow in stages.
This page describes the product direction, not a claim that every listed capability is available today.
Matter management
Matters move through stages you define, with checklists, deadlines, financials, and documents attached. Matter templates let you open a new engagement — with its standard checklist, tasks, and automations — in one step.
Custom fields by practice area
Family law, criminal defense, immigration, estate planning — each practice tracks different facts. Custom and meta fields are being designed to participate in forms, search, workflows, reporting, document generation, and AI context as real data—not annotations around a fixed vendor model.
Contacts, organizations & conflicts
A clean client and contact database with relationships, organizations, and CSV import — plus conflict checking against your full history before you take on a new matter.
Documents on your own filesystem
Usus works with the folders you already keep on disk instead of forcing uploads to a cloud drive. Generate documents from templates — DOCX merge and PDF form fill — straight into the matter's folder.
Calendar & tasks
Deadlines, hearings, appointments, and to-dos, tied to matters so nothing floats free. A global calendar shows the whole practice at a glance; each matter shows its own timeline.
Automation that earns its keep
Event-based rules and reusable recipes handle the routine: create follow-up tasks when a stage changes, schedule reminders before deadlines, keep checklists in sync. You approve anything consequential.
Leads & intake
Track prospects from first call to signed engagement — sources, follow-ups, and conversion — so business development doesn't live in a separate spreadsheet.
Time & billing foundations
Track time against matters and rates, with invoicing designed to grow with the product. Your billing data, like everything else, stays local.
The business of the firm
A practice manager should help operate the business
Legal work, client service, staffing, capacity, intake, and financial health affect one another. Usus is designed to connect them instead of treating business management as somebody else's spreadsheet.
Pipeline
Understand inquiries, referral sources, follow-up, engagement, and conversion.
Capacity
See workload, deadlines, responsibilities, and bottlenecks across the firm.
Performance
Connect activity, billing, collection, matter progress, and practice-level reporting.
Configuration
Represent the firm's own roles, stages, fields, templates, and operating rules.
AI, supervised
An AI research process, not an AI oracle
Usus treats legal research the way a careful firm treats an associate's memo: draft, challenge, revise, verify. Its AI harness runs independent research passes, has them deliberate, then subjects the result to an adversarial red-team review that hunts for weak authority and unsupported claims before you see it.
The same engine powers plain-language automation: tell Usus to "open a matter for the Rivera adoption and add the usual checklist," and it drafts exactly that for your confirmation.
- Built to run with local models — privileged material stays on your machine
- Deliberation across independent research passes, not one-shot answers
- Adversarial red-team pass to counter hallucination
- Every output is a draft for lawyer review — you stay in charge
- Plain-language commands for tasks, notes, and matter setup
Adoption, not entrapment
Migration and exit belong in the product design
Usus is developing an assisted import path for exports from existing systems. The same commitment applies in reverse: ordinary documents remain ordinary files, database exports will be documented, and leaving should not require the firm's former vendor to rescue its records.
Where we are
Built in the open, shipped honestly
Usus is in active development, with the free standalone edition shipping first: matters, contacts, documents, calendar, time tracking, and templates. Supervised AI workflows, business operations, migration, and automation expand through validation. Optional end-to-end encrypted sync and multi-user roles follow after the local experience is solid.
Early-access members see features as they land and directly shape what gets built next. If a feature on this page matters to your practice, joining the list is the best way to move it up the queue.
Founders program
Help shape Usus before public launch
Bring the workflows, practice-area structures, and adoption questions that a credible alternative must address.