We talked a lot about gaps in the market, but when talking to our clients, they really were not interested in anything that didn't come from a largish vendor. Compliance, liability and the belief that somehow the people writing it should also have passed the bar were frequently mentioned.
Those folks will never run something they pulled off Github.
you said your clients were lawyers. my question, how "big" were your clients? were they shoe string budgeted legal clinics, one man pratices or medium/large multi corps?
compliance and liability is talked about stuff which is usually customer facing, has some cloud version that might be stealing data and all that. There is little problems in running offline self hosted solutions that only reside in the local network and "for your eyes only" end to end.
A highly competitive market keep firms from collaborating on common [open source] goals and processes. Firms may have value systems far apart in their mission guiding their own work wich creates a social obstacle. A highly competitive (read: expensive) domain as it can be - professional signaling towards clients and competitor includes status and quality services; in which open source may be irrelevant at best, and dedicated person-to-person conduct of business is one of the best ways to deliver trust and quality. Maybe as a lawyer, you are better off using such de-facto standards as Clio.
I believe our most recent ML & AI have managed to breath some air into the historically tricky task of computationally work legalese in a practic way. A firm would probably keep a successful solution to themselves.
My hypotethical 5¢. /j
what you are saying is network effect is helping companies not allowing a foss competitor because that would cut into their bottom line?
so, i am offering my inputs. all the legal clinics around the world who need software for their day to day management who currently rely on google sheets and excel would love a foss alternative. self hosted would work for them.
the stuff used in house is probably not supposed to be known to your customers/competitors so network effect is out.
remember. tools dont need safeguarding. the knowledge inside does.
When you can have accounting packages and ERP software for million dollar orgs running on Foss software like erpnext, akaunting? Its not like lawyers are a niche market in the world.
The interesting thing is, I can find dozens of "dental practice" software and packages on sourceforge and github but none about lawyers.
Dont open source advocates/lawyers need open source tools? Anyone from the EFF legal team here? What do you guys use in house ?
Edit: I would be glad to assist in development by giving time and inputs.