Civil legal aid · 19+ programs · GPL licensed
Case management for legal aid, on a server nobody else shares.
Intake, matters, timekeeping, documents, grants and reporting, plus an AI assistant that answers from the case file in front of you. Every organization gets its own server and its own database, with no shared tenancy behind it. The source is GPL, so the software outlives any single vendor, including us.
Nothing charged for 14 days · a person reads what you send
- Problem
- 62 · Eviction / ejectment
- Funding
- LSC basic field
- Advocate
- R. Ellsworth
- Status
- Open · merits
Ask the matter
What court is the hearing in, and what have we filed?
The hearing is set in Courtroom 4B of the Circuit Court for Jones County, before Judge Smith. An answer and a jury demand were filed on July 9.
Drawn from
- notice_of_hearing.pdf
- answer_filed_0709.pdf
See OCM in practice
A guided tour of the work
Short demonstrations recorded in a configured demo system with synthetic data.
Ask the Matter
Real product footage · Captions included
19+
Legal aid organizations on the hosted fleet, each on its own instance
400+
Advocates, paralegals and administrators working in it daily
24+ yrs
Of continuous service in legal aid, counting the codebase's Pika lineage
GPL
Licensed in full. Self-host it, fork it, or hand it to another vendor
The platform
Everything a legal aid program runs on, in one system
OCM is not a general-purpose CRM bent into shape. It was built for civil legal aid, and it speaks the vocabulary: problem codes, funding sources, eligibility, timeslips, outcomes, LSC reporting.
Intake and eligibility
Prescreen, financial eligibility against current poverty guidelines, citizenship status, duplicate detection, and conflict checking before a case is ever opened.
Matters and case detail
A three-pane case record with configurable tabs, custom fields, outcome goals, and per-office case numbering your program controls.
Time and calendar
Timeslips with a pop-up timer and a quick-entry sheet, activity types, time approvals, and a shared calendar.
Documents
A documents browser with OCR on scanned uploads, document assembly from your program's own templates, and form letters.
Reporting and grants
A reports catalog, MegaReport for ad-hoc queries, scheduled reports by email, plus a grants manager with funder ledgers and per-case eligibility filters.
Client and partner access
A pro bono module, referrals, inter-office transfers, and APIs for connecting the client-facing intake tools your program already uses.
Communications
SMS with appointment reminders and inbound email from active staff accounts that threads into the case conversation.
Specialty modules
HUD housing counseling with 9902 and ARM reporting, immigration, VAWA and clinics, switched on per organization.
Matter AI
An assistant that has read the file, and shows you what it read
Most legal software has added a chatbot. The question worth asking is what it can see. Matter AI sits on the case-detail screen and answers from that matter's own documents, activities and parties, citing the documents it drew on so an advocate can check the work. Casey, the separate helper in the corner of every screen, answers how-do-I questions from the manual and never sees case content at all.
Ask the matter
Free-form questions answered from case metadata, the activity timeline, and retrieved excerpts of the case's own documents. If the answer isn't in the file, it says so instead of inventing one.
Choose where inference runs
Use Gemini on Vertex AI, an OpenAI-compatible provider, or Ollama on hardware you control. AI features stay off until your organization chooses a provider and enables them.
Drafting that stays a draft
Summaries, client emails, and motion drafts are always proposed, never written into the record on their own. A person accepts them.
Your own AI project
Each organization's AI runs in its own cloud project with its own budget cap and kill switch. Nothing is pooled across customers.
Architecture
One organization, one server
Your matters do not share a database with another program's matters. Every customer is provisioned onto a dedicated instance with its own database, its own document storage and its own backups.
Dedicated instance
A dedicated virtual machine provisioned for your organization alone in the United States, with its own subdomain and TLS certificate.
Backups you can hold
Encrypted daily backups, and a full data download you can run yourself whenever you want it. Your data leaves in a format you can read.
Access control that matches practice
Security levels by group, per-office scoping, and ethical walls that hold at the database and the AI retrieval layer alike.
Single sign-on
OIDC against Microsoft Entra or Google, TOTP two-factor, forced re-authentication on sensitive actions, and a full audit log.
Licensing
The exit is written into the license
OCM is GPL. Not source-available, not open-core with the useful parts held back. The whole application, under a license that guarantees you can run it yourself.
Legal aid programs have been through this before. A vendor is acquired, a version reaches end of life, a renewal price arrives that nobody budgeted for, and the program discovers its entire case history is somewhere it cannot reach. The GPL license does not ask you to trust a promise: it gives you the source and the legal right to keep running it.
We charge for hosting, upgrades, migrations, support and overnight on-call response. That is the work. Not permission to use your own records.
Why OCM
What you get here and nowhere else
Every system in this market has intake, matters, timekeeping and reporting. This is the rest: the things that are true here and are not true of the other major legal aid case management systems.
Features you will not find elsewhere
GPL source you are legally entitled to keep, a dedicated instance and database per organization, published per-seat pricing, and a choice of hosted or on-premises AI providers.
Read more →
Switching from another system
What a migration actually involves, step by step, and which source systems we have automated. Pika and earlier OCM migrations are included; moves from other systems are scoped and priced before work begins.
Read more →
Who builds it
A legal aid technologist, not a venture-backed platform play
OCM is built and operated by Clark Management Consulting, the practice of Alex Clark, a former legal aid attorney and full-stack developer who has built software since 2003 and worked in civil legal aid technology since 2016.
That matters mostly for one reason: the person deciding what OCM does next has sat through the intake, watched the grant report get assembled by hand, and knows what an LSC audit asks for.
Try it with your own matters for 14 days
Tell us how your program works and we will stand up an instance configured around it. Nothing is charged during the trial, and there is no obligation at the end of it.