A tabular document review companion for your claude legal skill

Harvey and Legora have taken the legal world by storm. One of their killer features is a tabular document review experience that lets you review documents with LLMs in bulk. Load a corpus of contracts, run structured extraction across every document, get results in a sortable grid with citations. It's powerful. It's also $100K+/year and locked behind enterprise sales cycles.

Meanwhile Claude is arguably the best reasoning model for legal work. The Claude legal skill exists. People are using Claude Code to review documents, extract clauses, compare agreements. The model capability is there. What's missing: a visual surface for that work. You can't review a thousand extraction results in a terminal. You can't browse your documents, filter by tag, drill into a specific filing, and then tell the agent to go deeper on that subset. Claude Code gives you the intelligence, but no good "canvas" to visually inspect and analyze your documents.

Introducing folio - a free, local Mac app that offers a Tabular Document Review experience for document reivew with LLMs. folio is agent-first and plugs into Claude Code/Desktop to let you collaborate with your agent on document review.

What it does

You load your files into a project: contracts, filings, transcripts, discovery documents. folio gives you a tabular view of the corpus. Every row is a document. Every column is a field you or the agent creates.

Then you work with your agent. Label each document by type. Extract governing law clauses into a column. Pull termination dates. Summarize every agreement in one sentence. Ask a question across the whole set and get per-document answers you can sort and filter.

The agent proposes operations in a sidebar: which files, which prompt, what it will cost. You approve before anything runs. Results fill in row by row.

How it compares

Harvey / Legora: Enterprise pricing. Cloud-hosted. Proprietary models. Closed ecosystem. Incredible product if your firm has the budget and the vendor approval.

Folio: Free. Local-first. Bring your own Claude API key. Your files are never stored anywhere but your machine. No account creation, no procurement cycle, no vendor review. A two-person law office gets the same tabular review workflow that a BigLaw firm pays six figures for.

Harvey and Legora have years of fine-tuning, custom models, and enterprise support, but folio gives you Claude's raw reasoning with a proper UI on top. For a lot of use cases, that's enough.

Why do you need another app ?

Agents already provide a very compelling experience for reviewing documents. Skills make it easy for lawyers to set up a reliable process for mapping allegations against contract provisions, organizing changes by severity and extracting structured data (see Zack Shapiro's take here). However, the textual UX still makes the experience clunky.

The model is the product and wrappers are mostly overhead. At the same time, manually reviewing outputs in a conversation, feeding feedback back in, verifying citations and steering the model can be non-trivial. The research process needs a visual review surface that lets work happen quickly.

When working in groups, traceability and versioning become a lot more important. Communicating a 10 step pipeline can be challenging without the right UX. Repeating the same process with slight adjustments can be cumbersome and token heavy. Folio fixes this by providing a set of minimal UX features, without getting in the way of the agent's work.

Privacy

Folio is deliberately designed to keep your data stored locally. For the most part, interacting with Folio is the same as interacting with the Anthropic API directly, with one minor difference.

Document OCR, Audio Transcription and handling hundreds of AI requests at the same time can be compute intensive and slow. To keep things fast without running a server, folio offloads these operations to Modal, a serverless compute platform. During onboarding, folio walks you through a one-click Modal account setup. Your data transits through your own Modal account and is never stored on their infrastructure. Modal is your own, private, mini-cloud account provisioned as an "extension" to your desktop. Data only flows through Modal in-transit and is never stored.

What's next

Folio is still new. The vision is a world where agents and humans collaborate in the most symbiotic way possible, while harnessing the power of AI advances and getting out of the model's way.

If you haven't tried folio yet, install it and then follow the Getting Started guide. Make sure to let us know what you think.