Free, open-source, local-first software for organizing a probate or estate case.
ProbateCase.ai helps an executor, administrator, or self-represented heir turn a pile of wills, account statements, court filings, and correspondence into something usable: a searchable timeline, a catalog of assets and obligations, grouped issues, and an exportable outline — all on your own machine. No account, no cloud, no subscription. Your documents never leave your computer.
⚖️ Not legal advice. This is an organizational tool. You are solely responsible for verifying every fact, date, and conclusion before relying on it in any legal proceeding. Always consult a licensed attorney.
Probate is paperwork-heavy and slow, and most people going through it are doing it for the first time, often while grieving. The mechanical work — building a timeline of the estate, tracking assets and deadlines, pulling quotes back to their source document — is tedious but mechanical. This app does that part locally, for free.
It was originally a paid product. It's now MIT-licensed and free for anyone who needs it.
- Document ingestion — import PDFs, Word docs, and plain text; OCR for scanned filings.
- Interactive timeline — events extracted from your documents, sorted and filterable.
- Issue & obligation tracking — surface deadlines, claims, and obligations with the source passage attached.
- Pattern groups — cluster related items so recurring issues read clearly.
- Outline editor — assemble an outline and export it to
.docx. - Semantic search — find the right passage across every document by meaning, not keywords.
- Local encryption — case data lives in an encrypted SQLite database behind a passphrase, with auto-lock on idle.
Everything runs on your machine. The app ships with no telemetry and makes no network calls unless you configure a cloud AI provider.
- Default: Ollama — runs the AI 100% locally, fully offline.
- Optional cloud models — you may supply your own OpenAI, Anthropic, or xAI API key in Settings. Keys are stored in your OS keychain; only then does the app contact that provider.
Download a prebuilt release from the Releases
page — signed macOS .dmg (Apple Silicon + Intel) and Windows installer.
git clone https://github.com/randylahey-dev/ProbateCase.ai.git
cd ProbateCase.ai
npm install
npm run dev # run in development
npm run dist:mac # or dist:win / dist:linux to packageRequires Node.js 20+. For local AI, install Ollama and pull a model — the app handles model downloads from there.
Electron · React 19 · Zustand · Tailwind · better-sqlite3 (encrypted) · tesseract.js (OCR) · pdf-lib / mammoth / pdf-parse · docx · electron-vite
MIT — use it, fork it, ship it. Contributions welcome.