Building Law-Aware AI With Billions of Investment

The tech community is buzzing with the news that a mid-sized law firm has just spent $35,000 - equivalent to nearly one billion Vietnamese Dong - to hire a developer to build a completely private artificial intelligence system. Surprisingly, instead of criticizing the "wastefulness", most opinions say that this number is "extremely reasonable" and even "cheap".

The story begins when a developer named u/eeko_systems shared on Reddit about the biggest deal of his career. Instead of using available AI services like ChatGPT or Claude, this law firm decided to invest in building a completely independent "AI fortress" that does not depend on any supplier.

The system is built on Meta's LLaMA 3 70B model, deployed on the CoreWeave platform with dual A100 GPUs - the most powerful graphics processors currently available for AI. What's special is that all data and processing takes place entirely in an environment controlled by the law firm, without a single byte of information leaving their system.

To understand the complexity of this system, imagine a “super assistant” that can read and understand thousands of pages of legal documents in seconds, answer complex legal questions, summarize cases, and even analyze contracts in detail. All done through a simple web interface that any lawyer in the firm can use.

The technology behind the system requires a sophisticated combination of components. ChromaDB acts as a giant “digital library,” converting all documents into data that AI can understand.

LlamaIndex acts as an “intelligent secretary,” helping AI search and extract the right information from mountains of documents. Meanwhile, n8n takes on the role of “coordinator,” automating everything from uploading new documents to sending notifications via Slack and email.

What has the tech community in awe is not just the functionality but also the level of security. The system is equipped with JWT authentication, IP-based access control, and full logging of all activities. These are mandatory requirements in the legal industry, where information leakage can lead to serious legal consequences.

But why is $35,000 considered “cheap” for such a system? The answer lies in operating costs. Renting dual A100 GPUs on CoreWeave can cost between $6,000 and $8,000 per month, which means that infrastructure costs alone are $72,000 to $96,000 a year. The $35,000 it takes to set up the entire system is equivalent to just 4-5 months of operating costs.

Furthermore, if a law firm decides to build its own in-house AI team, it will have to spend at least $400,000 per year on AI, DevOps, and security experts, not to mention the time and risk involved in the development process. Enterprise solutions from giants like Microsoft or Google typically cost between $100,000 and $500,000, but still rely on third-party APIs—something many law firms cannot afford.

Interestingly, just as this story was making the rounds, another important event happened. DeepSeek, an AI startup from China, just released a “lite” version of its R1 model that can run on just a single GPU instead of the dozens of GPUs it used to.

But DeepSeek’s emergence also raises questions about the future. Will using technology from a Chinese startup meet the compliance requirements of a U.S. law firm? Will the smaller model’s performance be sufficient to handle complex legal tasks? These are questions that law firms will need to consider carefully.

Interestingly, while many other industries are still hesitant to adopt AI, law firms are showing surprising decisiveness. Perhaps because in the legal industry, time is literally money. An AI that can analyze thousands of pages of documents in minutes instead of weeks can have huge benefits.