Practice management built to take customers away from the companies that treat lawyers like ATMs.
Practice management for solo and small law firms: intake, engagement letters, billing, payments, trust accounting, documents, research, personal injury and criminal defense, a client portal, and an AI assistant that uses your own key. Twenty-eight tools, every one of them included, none of them sold separately.
The code is public. Run it yourself for free, or let us host it for you at cost. We are not building this to be nice. We are building it because the companies selling legal software have earned a competitor that charges nothing. The waitlist form on this page puts you on the list.
- 28tools, all included
- 85features mapped to the products they replace
- 235automated tests
- $0during the beta, hosted or self-hosted
Join the beta waitlist
Free during the beta. We reply within one business day with your place in line.
A replacement for the whole stack, built to cost you nothing.
A solo practice runs on a handful of tools: something to bring clients in, something to get the engagement letter signed, something to bill and get paid, a trust ledger the bar will accept, a place for documents, and lately an AI that can read a file. Today those come from four or five vendors, each with its own subscription, and the big platforms bundle them into suites where you pay for everything to use a fraction.
Coil does all of it in one place. It was built by reading what solos say they actually use, then building those things well and leaving the rest out. The goal is simple: be the free or at-cost replacement for legal software, be as low cost as it is possible to be, and make the incumbents earn their renewals for once.
It is open source under the AGPL. That is not a marketing line. It means you can read the code that touches your trust account, hand it to your IT person, run it on a Mac mini in the office, and keep running it whether or not we exist. If you would rather not run a server, we host it for you and charge what the hosting costs.
We are Law Firm Automate. We make our living on AI and automation work for law firms, including private AI for law firms that runs alongside Coil. Coil is how we would rather be introduced.
To take business away from companies with awful business practices.
Per-seat pricing. Intake sold separately. E-signature sold separately. The AI sold separately. A markup on payments on top of what the processor already takes. A price bump at every renewal, and a migration so painful you pay it anyway. Then you log in and use maybe 15% of the thing.
That is the whole reason Coil exists. Per-seat pricing for a two-person firm. Add-ons for things that should have been included. Rate hikes once you are locked in. A payments product that started cheap and quietly got expensive. Data you cannot easily leave with.
Coil is the answer to all of that, and it is free. Consider it a middle finger to the way this industry prices software.
Sound familiar?
- You cannot print a statement of everything one client has been billed.
- You cannot change the invoice template.
- Intake lives in a separate product, and you re-enter the client when they sign.
- Flat fee billing is an afterthought bolted onto an hourly system.
- The engagement letter goes out and you have no idea whether it was opened.
- The trust reconciliation is a chore, and now they want to sell you accounting too.
- Every year there is a new add-on you did not ask for, and a new price for the old ones.
Every one of those is fixed in Coil. The feature map files each fix under the product it replaces.
The tools. All built, all included.
No tiers. Every card is in every copy of Coil, hosted or self-hosted.
Clients and intake
Intake
Web form to lead to matter in one click, with the conflict check already run.
Engagement letters
Click-to-sign, and you see every time the client opens it.
Conflict check
Fuzzy search across contacts, aliases, parties, files and messages.
Client portal
Magic-link login. Invoices, documents, messages, letters to sign, in English or Spanish.
Secure messaging
Portal messages and two-way texting, attached to the matter.
E-signature
Any document, any signer, with a certificate of who, when, where and what.
Time and money
Time and timer
Six-minute rounding, receipt capture from your phone, browser time suggestions.
Invoicing
Flat fee first. Hourly, contingency and hybrid too. Bulk runs, approvals, split billing.
Invoice templates
Your logo, colours, columns and wording. Editable, with a preview.
Client statements
Every bill and payment for one client on one page.
Payments
Your own Stripe account. Bank transfer free, card with a surcharge you set. Cards on file, payment plans.
Trust accounting
Client ledgers that refuse to go negative, and a three-way reconciliation that works.
Accounting
Operating ledger, bank import, reconciliation, profit and loss, QuickBooks exports.
Reports
AR aging, WIP, origination, realization, profitability, compensation.
Documents and deadlines
Documents
Versions, folders, tags, full-text search inside files, email filing to matters.
Document automation
Word and HTML templates filled from the matter, straight into the file.
Calendar and deadlines
Recurring events, per-person calendars, feeds to Google or Outlook, court-rule deadline chains.
Research
Case law search and full opinions on a free public database, saved to the matter.
Cite check
Paste a brief, get every citation that does not resolve flagged before you file.
Litigation and practice areas
Personal injury
Providers, records requests, liens, demand packages, a settlement worksheet that posts to trust.
Records to chronology
Drop in medical records and get a dated treatment chronology to review.
Demand drafting
A narrative demand from the chronology and facts, in your voice.
Discovery
Propound from starter sets or respond to what was served, with objections flagged.
Depositions
Transcript in, summary and page-line testimony out, contradictions caught.
Criminal defense
Charges, settings, court date chains, plea offers, dispositions.
AI and platform
AI assistant
Bring your own key. Summaries, dates from documents, invoice narratives, plain-English questions.
Case audit
A nightly sweep of every open case for the things that get missed.
API and extension
Tokens, webhooks, a Chrome extension for time, and a phone-intake endpoint.
As low cost as it is possible to be.
These are the rules Coil is built under. If one of them changes, beta firms hear it first.
- One published price for hosting, and nothing else. No seats, no tiers, no add-ons.
- Free to run yourself, forever. One container, one database file, your hardware.
- Open source under the AGPL. Read every line. Change it. Take it with you.
- Your data exports to CSV at any time. There is no lock-in because there is no reason to build one.
- Payments at the processor's rate through your own Stripe account. Nobody in the middle takes a cut.
- If a feature would only exist to justify a higher tier, it does not get built.
Hosted at cost, or on your own hardware for free.
Hosted for you
Your own instance on your own subdomain, a separate database, nightly backups, and we run the updates. Nothing to install. Bring your Stripe account for payments. Free during the beta, then the hosting cost, published as one number.
Join the waitlistRun it yourself
One container and a single database file. A Mac mini in the office, a laptop, a $5 server. One install command, a written guide, and the source on GitHub. Free, and your data never leaves your hardware. You need a free install key, which takes a minute.
Get the installerLeave whenever you like
Contacts, matters, time, invoices, payments and the full trust ledger export to CSV from the Exports page. The source is at github.com/Law-Firm-Automate/coil under the AGPL-3.0.
Left out on purpose.
If one of these is a deal-breaker, the big platforms are the right answer and we will say so.
- LEDES-only workflows for insurance defense beyond the export we ship.
- Automatic time capture from inside Word or Outlook. The browser extension suggests time; nothing watches your desktop.
- A live QuickBooks sync. You get clean CSV exports built for the QuickBooks importer.
- Court e-filing. That needs a vendor, and we will say which one when we have one we trust.
Common questions
What does Coil cost?
Nothing during the beta. No card, no trial clock. When the beta ends, the hosted version is priced at what it costs us to run it, published as one number. Running it yourself stays free. Beta firms hear about any change first and directly, and can export everything before deciding.
Why would you give this away?
Because the tools a solo actually uses cost very little to run, and the market charges $50 to $150 per user per month for them anyway. We make our living on AI and automation work for law firms. Coil is a good way to meet, and a good way to prove we build things that work.
What does open source mean for a law firm?
The code is public under the AGPL-3.0. You, or anyone you hire, can read it, audit how it handles trust money and client data, change it, and run it anywhere. If we vanished tomorrow, Coil would keep running and someone else could keep improving it. No closed product can promise that.
How is Coil different from the big platforms?
It does less, on purpose, and charges nothing for it. The big platforms run $49 to $149 per user per month, sell intake, e-signature and AI as separate products, and cannot tell you whether the engagement letter was opened. Coil treats intake to signature as one step, makes flat fee the default, and skips the parts most solos never open.
Is the e-signature valid?
Click-to-sign with a typed name, an affirmative checkbox, and an audit record of the signer, IP address, user agent, timestamp and document hash is the same model most e-signature products use under ESIGN and UETA. It is not notarization, and for documents your state requires to be wet-signed you should still use paper.
Is the trust accounting compliant with my state bar?
It keeps individual client ledgers, never lets a client balance go negative, records every deposit and disbursement with a reference, and produces a three-way reconciliation against your bank statement. Bar rules on frequency and retention differ by state, so you remain responsible for the schedule and for reviewing the reports.
Where does my data live?
Hosted firms get their own database on a server we operate, separate from every other firm. Self-hosted firms keep it wherever they run the container. Either way the whole database is a single file you can copy.
Can I import from my current system?
Contacts import from CSV. Existing matters are entered as open balances rather than full history. A fuller importer is the first thing beta feedback will decide.