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Neon Law Navigator

Sovereign legal software you can run yourself.

An open-source operating system for a modern law practice — versioned legal templates, durable workflows, attorney-reviewed automation, and agent-accessible tooling.

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Your practice. Your data. Your cloud.

Neon Law Navigator is sovereign software, built to run on infrastructure you control. Self-host it, and your client data stays where you put it.

Neon Law runs it on Google Cloud. Because the stack is cloud-native open source — Kubernetes for orchestration, Postgres for data, and licensable services like Restate for durable execution — you can run the same system in your own cloud.

Neon Law Navigator

Our mission is to improve access to justice. Neon Law Navigator is an open-source operating system for a modern law practice, built around versioned legal templates, durable workflows, attorney-reviewed automation, and agent-accessible tooling.

How it works

Neon Law Navigator contains a shared core of rules and implementations as a command-line executable, an MCP server, and a website. If you are a lawyer, you are encouraged to use Neon Law Navigator to supplement your existing AI conversations with reliable legal workflows.

After you install the navigator and a client contacts your firm, a Project is created for their Matter. Every project contains a git repository of its files and Templates, the markdown blueprints that define the intake questions and workflows required to solve legal problems.

For example, the Nevada entity-formation Template defines the questions required for filling out an entity formation, the workflows that are required, and where that data is used in the Template body. When you work with your client, you create a Notation from a Template. For coders, a Notation is a workflow executed with a durable execution engine.

Templates live on two shelves. templates/forms/ mirrors the public assets bucket for government forms (forms/united_states/nevada/state/nv__llc_formation.pdf), and each sibling .md declares the jurisdiction-first form code plus the government origin_url. templates/neon_law/ holds the firm's product work: product retainers, engagement letters, product-specific documents, and shared closing letters. Start with notation authoring and the templates README before adding a template.

We encourage writing Templates with Zed and our LSP. It's different from Word, but once you get used to it, you may find it as productive as we do. Treating legal text like code opens a plethora of automations that save time, and we see its impact in scaling legal services.

Install the CLI

On Apple Silicon macOS, install the navigator CLI from our Homebrew tap:

brew install neon-law-foundation/tap/navigator

A new YY.M.D release publishes every day, so brew upgrade always pulls the latest build. The published binaries are Apple-Silicon only; on other platforms — or to hack on the workspace — build from source with cargo as below. The tap and its formulae live at neon-law-foundation/homebrew-tap.

For editor integration, install Navigator LSP from Zed's extension marketplace (zed: extensions → search Navigator LSP → Install). The extension pulls the matching navigator-lsp binary from the latest GitHub Release automatically. Building the binary from source — and pointing any other LSP-aware editor at it — is covered in the LSP docs.

Getting started

To run Neon Law Navigator on your machine, run the following and review its output. The invocation will spawn a Rust process and a KIND cluster with common Linux Foundation technologies.

cargo run -p cli -- dev up

If you want to deploy Neon Law Navigator to the cloud, we recommend Google Cloud with Doppler, Restate, Twilio, DNSimple, and Mercury. GitHub Actions builds and publishes the dated container images to ghcr.io; you then roll a published image onto your GKE cluster with one command and visit the bundle's brand.primary_domain:

doppler run -- cargo run --release -p cli -- ops ship --tag YY.M.D

The full edit → merge → release → deploy lifecycle is documented in GitOps. Cluster setup lives in GKE production; a from-scratch fork install is in OSS install. For each command, the error messages will tell you what you need. Loop that back to your LLM of choice, like Claude.

Navigator ships as Neon Law by default. A fork opts into its own identity by setting NAVIGATOR_CUSTOM_BRANDING to a deployment-owned mounted bundle — individual brand fields are still never read from the environment. Start from navigator.example.yaml, build it with navigator ops rebrand build, mount it read-only at /etc/navigator/brand, and point NAVIGATOR_CUSTOM_BRANDING there; the OSS install guide documents the Kubernetes contract and the distinction from application administration.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome under the Contributor License and Feedback Agreement.

License

Licensed under either of the following at your option.

Trademarks

The license above covers the code: fork it, modify it, ship it, even sell it under Apache-2.0 or MIT. It does not grant any right to the names and marks of Neon Law. "Neon Law" is a registered trademark of Shook Law PLLC, U.S. Reg. No. 6,325,650.

The reason is non-deception, not control: a fork wearing the firm's name could imply that Neon Law or its attorneys stand behind software no attorney reviewed. So adopt your own name, and if you are interested, help us enable custom branding for your organization.

Nothing here is legal advice. Using it does not create an attorney-client relationship. We are not legally responsible for any actions you take with Neon Law Navigator unless it's agreed and signed in writing.