Running a law firm on Free software

Running a law firm on Free software (2026 edition) Published on: 2026-11-06 12:18:47 by Neil Brown I started running decoded.legal - a small English law firm, focussing on Internet, telecoms, and tech law - on Free software, both client and server side, around five years ago. I have used Free software in my personal life for a lot longer than that. Back in 2022, I wrote about my experiences after the first year or so . I wrote an update in 2024 . Someone asked me recently what I am doing now, and, while it is mostly the same, some bits have changed. So here is the 2026 update. Client-side stuff I am still using Debian, with GNOME, and it works well for me. I’m using it on a ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 6 , as my primary machine, and, being a “Yoga” version, I rather like being able to fold the screen back and write on it to mark up documents. ( Here are my thoughts on the different “Active Pens” available for it .) However, the machine itself seems to have a hardware problem with the Thunderbolt / USB-C ports (fine for power, very flaky for data), and so I might need to replace it. And I have no idea what laptop I might get. Email (MUA): Thunderbird and mutt , depending on what I am doing Quick Folder Move and Move Message And Yourself are particularly useful add-ons for Thunderbird, for rapid filing of email with keyboard shortcuts Thunderbird seems to be having a problem with some recurring calendar invitations, while ikhal is handling them fine. I’ve not dug into it, but it is a nuisance. Document production: LibreOffice’s Writer if I want a “Word” document (e.g. I am exchanging documents with other lawyers), and I am using pandoc and typst to convert Markdown files that I tend to write in vim for some other bits. I’d like to explore tex at some point, as I have a client who likes diffs to their .tex files, and that looks rather neat. Presentations: reveal.js I absolutely love this. I have a bash script which sets up a template for a new presentation, and then I just write the presentation using Markdown. I get a nicely-formatted presentation (using a css template) with very little effort, and no distracting GUI Blogpost about reveal.js Here are some presentations I’ve given, using reveal.js File manager: Nautilus Mainly because it is GNOME’s default, although, especially when combined with some useful bash scripts , it works well for my needs PDFs: evince for most reading; Xournal++ for marking up PDFs; PDFarranger and pdftk for interfering with PDFs Text expansion: espanso This is a fantastic shortcut for me, saving me from typing the same thing multiple times. I have loads of shortcuts set up, and I’d be lost without them. Browser: Firefox or links I am still using Firefox. It is … fine? I should probably look at LibreWolf or another fork, as I’m not enamoured by Mozilla’s direction of travel but, for now, Firefox it is. I use Firefox for joining people’s Teams and Zoom etc. meetings, if someone else sets up the meeting, and that works fine Local wiki / knowledge management: vimwiki because I use vim so much, vimwiki was quite an obvious choice. I use this for keeping track of my professional development, and for various notes Disk encryption: LUKS Client-side encryption of files before syncing them with Syncthing : Cryptomator Fediverse: I tend to use the Mastodon advanced web UI or, when I want fewer images, the TUI toot . I schedule toots - for example, about blogposts, using a simple bash script and a cron job ; it has moved on a bit since I wrote that post, but it is the same principle Password manager: Bitwarden , using the vaultwarden server, with YubiKeys for managing more sensitive credentials Markdown editor (for blogposts; I do presentations in vim or gedit): Apostrophe Scanning: paperless-ngx Label printing: there’s a great FOSS web UI for Brother (and perhaps other) label printers . I don’t print many labels, as we aim to be paperless, but it’s convenient when I need to do so Why so many terminal-based tools? The simple answer is that I am very comfortable in a terminal, and I like them. They have fewer distractions and, when compared with most GUI software, are just - IMHO - easier to use, especially when I don’t need to move my hands away from the keyboard. So, while I don’t use them exclusively, I use mutt , vim , ikhal , ncmpcpp , newsboat , toot , links , and various other TUIs, frequently. Server-side stuff Everything here - other than Signal - is self-hosted, and I’m mostly using Intel NUCs now. I still have some Raspberry Pi devices, but fewer than I did. (Again, this doesn’t list everything; just the main applications.) Email (MTA): postfix / dovecot I need to move our mail infrastructure at some point, and I want to look at Stalwart. File synchronisation: Syncthing One of the bigger changes since last time was moving away from Nextcloud. I just was not getting on with it, and it was causing me more problems than it solved. So I switched to Syncthing for file sync, and radicale for CalDAV / CardDAV. I’ve been more than happy with this combination. Video conferencing: Signal I ran jitsi for years, but stopped using it a few months back. Jitsi is great, and I remain a fan, but most of the time I am joining other people’s Teams or Zoom meetings, so I was running the Jitsi server for very little usage. I turned it off, and instead offer Signal. I have had no grumbles. Invoicing and tracking payments: InvoicePlane , just for generating PDF invoices. Clients don’t interact with it Time tracking: Kimai v2 of Kimai is excellent, and I had a very pleasant exchange with the developer, which is always nice. “Case management” / “Matter management”: EspoCRM VPN: WireGuard , using trailofbit’s algo ansible scripts on one machine, and PiVPN on another (albeit not on a Pi) Vulnerability scanning: greenbone/OpenVAS Monitoring: Uptime Kuma I implemented this not long after the last update. It … just works? Forge / hosted git repository: Forgejo I use this for version tracking the website, and for a couple of template projects I do not host anything particularly important on it - for that, I have a git process running on another machine, which is not accessible over the Internet, and I just push to that SIEM: Wazuh Password manager: vaultwarden Website: it is a static site built via mkdocs , hosted on apache2 It got even simpler and even faster to load. Yes, it’s basic, but I like it! We still have an .onion version . If you visit decoded.legal in Tor Browser, it should re-direct your automatically Blog: BSSG After a couple of annoyances with hugo, I moved to BSSG - a bash static site generator. The developer, Stefano, is amazing, and it is working incredibly well. I’ve gone for a very basic, easy to read, theme - which should be very similar to what was there before - and there’s still an RSS feed for it, of course I blog quite frequently, and, rather than keep private / internal “knowhow” files, I tend to just blog things and share the learnings I tend to use my personal blog for posts about the more technical bits and pieces I have automated the most common actions - templates, and publishing - using bash scripts, so that I can focus on writing (in Markdown); getting it online is the easiest bit Fediverse: I am using the *glitch-soc Mastodon** fork Switching from normal Mastodon to glitch-soc Mastodon was easy I stopped using Markdown in toots, even though I like the rendered output (i.e. as html not as markdown), but this is not supported consistently well across clients, so I stopped using it. I turned off decoded.legal’s own fedi instance. I had been on the fence as to whether this is worthwhile or not for a while, and decided that, really, it was not. Knowledge management, and