Eighteen months of Open Bar: 4,200 paralegals, what they use and what they ignore

A paralegal at a housing clinic in a mid-sized English city has nineteen minutes between appointments. In that time she needs to work out whether the notice her next client has been served is valid, what the deadline for responding is, and whether the clinic has handled a similar case against the same landlord before.

That is the Open Bar user we think about. Not the law-firm associate with a ninety-page SPA, but the person with nineteen minutes and a queue. Open Bar has been the free tier for legal-aid clinics, public defenders and pro-bono practitioners since December 2023. This note is about what eighteen months of use looks like from our side.

Who is using it

As of this month, Open Bar has around 4,200 people who use it at least weekly, across roughly 310 organisations. The split is approximately:

• Legal-aid clinics and advice centres: a little over half.
• Public defender and duty-solicitor offices: around a fifth.
• Pro-bono programmes inside private firms and in-house teams: around a fifth.
• Law-school clinics: the remainder.

Geographically, the largest groups are in the UK, Germany, France, the US and Spain, with smaller but growing use in South Africa, Kenya and Brazil. The job titles are mostly paralegal, caseworker, adviser and supervising solicitor. Qualified lawyers are a minority of users, which is roughly the reverse of our commercial accounts.

What they use

Review, for notices and standard-form documents. Not for negotiated contracts, which clinic clients rarely have. The documents that go through Review in Open Bar are eviction notices, debt-collection letters, tenancy agreements, employment contracts and benefit-decision letters. The playbooks are small, often fewer than thirty entries, and intensely practical: is this notice in the prescribed form, does it give the right period, is the signatory who it should be. Clinics have shared playbooks with each other through the Open Bar community, and a handful of housing and employment playbooks are now used across dozens of organisations with local variations.

Recall, for “have we seen this before”. The second most used surface, by a wide margin, and the one supervisors value most. Clinic matter histories are long and staff turnover is high. A caseworker in her first month can ask whether the clinic has dealt with a particular landlord, employer or lender and get the previous files in seconds, with the ethical walls that clinics operate between advice streams enforced at query time as in any other account.

AI Interview, since the preview. Open Bar organisations were a large part of the Interview preview cohort, and the structured brief with limitation dates has been taken up fast. The use case is triage: an advice line that receives more calls than it can answer uses Interview to take the first conversation, and a supervisor works through the briefs in order of limitation urgency. We will write separately about what the clinics taught us about intake.

What they ignore

Draft. Almost entirely. Clinics do not draft many agreements. The exceptions are template letters, which Draft handles but which clinics already have in a shared drive and see no reason to regenerate. We considered building a letters mode and decided, on reflection, that the shared drive was fine.

Severity tuning. Open Bar playbooks tend to leave every entry at the default severity. When we asked, the answer was consistent: the documents are short, the issues are few, and a flag is a flag. The three-tier system matters when a document has forty flags. A notice has three.

The administrator console, mostly. Clinics configure once, usually with help from a volunteer or from us, and then do not return. Features that assume an active administrator, such as scheduled playbook reviews, go unused. We have made the defaults more conservative as a result.

Integrations. Most Open Bar organisations do not have a document management system in the sense our commercial accounts do. They have a shared folder, a case-management system of varying age, and email. Recall in Open Bar indexes what it is pointed at. The connectors we build for law-firm DMS products are irrelevant here, and the connectors that would matter, to the case-management systems clinics actually run, are a slow and unglamorous piece of work that we are doing one system at a time.

What we have changed because of them

• Review runs on photographs. Clinic clients bring notices on their phones. Review in Open Bar accepts a photo, runs text recognition and reviews the result, with a confidence indicator on the recognised text. This started as an Open Bar request and is now in every account.
• Shorter briefs. The Interview brief for Open Bar streams defaults to a one-page version with eligibility and urgency at the top.
• Offline-tolerant Review. Advice sessions happen in community centres with poor connectivity. The Review 3.8 rebuild, which put the review state in the document, was partly motivated by this.
• A smaller onboarding. The commercial onboarding assumes a project team. The Open Bar onboarding is a forty-minute call and a shared playbook.

What we have not solved

Supervision. A caseworker who accepts a Review flag or acts on an Interview brief is doing so, often, without a qualified lawyer in the room. Open Bar does not change the professional-responsibility position; the supervising solicitor remains responsible. But it does change the volume, and several clinic supervisors have told us candidly that they are now reviewing more decisions than before, faster, because the tool lets caseworkers get further on their own. Whether that is a net improvement in supervision quality is a question we cannot answer from our data, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

Open Bar is free and will stay free. The people using it have nineteen minutes, and we have tried to give some of those minutes back.