Support
How can we help?
For Lysias on macOS
Lysias is a legal-writing app for the Mac, made by one person. If something is wrong, unclear, or missing, write and you will hear back from the developer.
Response time: usually within two business days.
Helpful to include: your macOS version, the Lysias version (Lysias menu → About Lysias), what you did, and what you expected to happen. A screenshot is worth a paragraph. Never send a real brief or a client's name — a description, or a made-up example, is all that is needed.
From inside the app: Help → Contact Support… opens a new message to the address above, and Help → Lysias Support opens this page.
Common questions
How does the free trial work?
Lysias is free to download and fully usable for 14 days from first launch. When the trial ends, your projects still open, read, typeset, and export — only editing waits for the one-time unlock. Nothing you wrote is ever held back.
What does the unlock cost, and is it a subscription?
The Full Unlock is a single in-app purchase of US$99.99 (or the equivalent in your local currency), bought through the Mac App Store. It is not a subscription; there is nothing that renews. Buy it from Lysias menu → Unlock Lysias…, or from the banner that appears above the editor after the trial.
I bought the unlock on another Mac. How do I use it here?
Open Lysias menu → Unlock Lysias… and click Restore Purchase. Sign in with the Apple Account you bought it with if asked. The purchase belongs to that Apple Account and works on every Mac signed into it.
Refunds
Purchases are handled by Apple, so refunds are too: visit reportaproblem.apple.com, find the purchase, and choose Request a refund.
Does Lysias need an account or an API key?
No. There is no account, no sign-in, and nothing to pay for beyond the unlock. Two optional keys exist for people who want them, both free:
- CourtListener (Free Law Project). Lysias fetches court opinions from the public Caselaw Access Project archive with no key at all. A free CourtListener account additionally lets Lysias look up a case from its citation and fill in its caption. Create the account at courtlistener.com, open your profile's API token page, and paste the token into Lysias → Settings → Accounts. Free accounts have a modest rate limit; Lysias never asks you to pay CourtListener.
- New York OpenLegislation (the New York State Senate). Only needed to fetch the text of New York statutes. Sign up free at legislation.nysenate.gov and paste the key into Settings → Accounts.
Every other source — the United States Code, the Constitution, the Federal Rules, the Code of Federal Regulations, the Uniform Commercial Code, and the statutes of the supported states — needs no key. A key is stored only on your Mac and is sent only to the service it belongs to.
Where are my files?
A project is a .lyproj package saved wherever you chose
when you created it — Documents, iCloud Drive, Dropbox, anywhere. Inside
it are plain-text Markdown, the authorities you added, and the snapshot
history. Nothing is stored on a server.
I closed the project window. How do I get back?
The Welcome window appears whenever no project is open, listing your recent projects. It is also under Window → Welcome to Lysias, and File → Open Recent lists the same projects.
The preview shows an error
Write with the text of the message shown in the preview pane and, if you can, the sentence or citation it points at. Typesetting runs entirely on your Mac, so the message is the whole story.
Word export, PDF export
File → Export… writes a PDF (typeset by the bundled engine) or a Word document (.docx), with the citations, footnotes, tables, and caption written out.
Reporting a bug
Email the address above. If the app crashed, macOS will have offered to send a report to Apple; a copy of that report (or the text of any error message) speeds things up. If a citation is written wrongly, send the citation as you typed it and the form you expected — those are the reports most worth having.
Privacy
Lysias collects nothing; the full privacy policy is one page.