⚖️A Lawyer Runs His Entire Firm on Free Software Built Around Debian and GNOME
Your law firm could run without a single paid license
TL;DR
A solo law practice has spent five years running entirely on free and open-source software, from Debian and LibreOffice to self-hosted Forgejo and Wazuh. The stack proves you can drop proprietary tools without losing billing, case management, or security.
Running a law firm on free software sounds like a hobbyist flex until you see the full stack. One practitioner has done it for about five years, and the setup covers everything from document drafting to invoicing to SIEM. Nothing here is a demo. It's daily production. If you build internal tools or run a small team, the interesting part is the architecture. Documents go through LibreOffice Writer and reveal.js, email runs on Thunderbird and mutt, and case and matter tracking lives in EspoCRM. Time tracking is Kimai, invoicing is InvoicePlane, and passwords sit in Bitwarden. The author also self-hosts Forgejo for git, Uptime Kuma for monitoring, and Wazuh for SIEM. The hardware is modest. The primary machine is a ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 6, which has a known Thunderbolt and USB-C port problem. Servers run on Intel NUCs and Raspberry Pis, with postfix and dovecot handling mail, Syncthing for sync, and restic plus rsync for backups. Encryption is LUKS plus Cryptomator, and DNS runs unbound behind Pi-Hole.
Key Points
Primary machine is a ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 6 running Debian with GNOME, which the author says has a hardware fault in its Thunderbolt and USB-C ports.
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