AI for Lawyers
Legal is one of the few professions where AI has produced tools worth their price rather than novelties. Contract review and first-draft work are genuinely faster now. Research is faster too, and it is also where practitioners have been sanctioned for filing citations that did not exist, so the citation warning below is not optional reading.
Contract drafting and review
The most mature legal AI there is. These read a contract against a standard, flag what deviates, and suggest the clause you would have typed. The good ones work where you already work rather than making you paste documents into a browser.
- SpellbookPAID~$89/mo
Runs inside Microsoft Word, so review happens in the document rather than a separate tool. The reason it gets adopted where others get abandoned.
- Robin AIPAID~$79/mo
Built for volume — a stack of NDAs or supplier agreements reviewed against your playbook rather than one contract at a time.
- LegoraPAID~$100/mo
Strong on collaborative review where several people touch the same document, and it shows its sources for each suggestion.
- HarveyPAID~$100/mo
The firm-scale option, trained for legal work and priced for practices rather than individuals. Expect a procurement conversation, not a signup.
Research and case analysis
Faster than reading everything, and the place where the profession has been burned. Every tool here is a way of finding the authority; none of them is a substitute for opening it.
- CoCounselPAID~$100/mo
Legal-specific research and document review from Thomson Reuters, which means it is answering from a real legal corpus rather than the open web.
- NotebookLMFREE$0
Upload the bundle — pleadings, disclosure, contracts — and question those documents only. Answers cite the page they came from, so you can check every one.
- ClaudeFREEMIUM~$20/mo
Handles long documents better than most and does not bluff as readily when asked to summarise a 200-page agreement.
- PerplexityFREEMIUM~$20/mo
Quick orientation on an unfamiliar area with links to follow. A map, not a source.
Client intake, meetings and matter admin
The unbilled hours. Notes, follow-ups, scheduling and the small drafting jobs that pile up between the actual legal work.
- Fireflies.aiFREEMIUM~$18/mo
Records and summarises client calls with action points, so the file note writes itself while the detail is still accurate.
- GranolaFREEMIUM~$14/mo
Better than a full transcript when you want a usable attendance note rather than 6,000 words of verbatim.
- GrammarlyFREEMIUM~$12/mo
Catches the typo in the letter that goes out under your name. Dull, and the highest-value tool on this list per pound.
- MotionPAID~$34/mo
Keeps a deadline-driven workload ordered when three matters move at once.
For consumers rather than firms
One entry, listed separately on purpose. If you are a practitioner this is not your tool; if you are a member of the public who found this page looking for help with a parking ticket, it is the honest answer.
Lawyers in several jurisdictions have been fined and referred for filing submissions containing case citations that a general AI model invented, complete with plausible names, courts and dates. This failure mode has not been solved, only reduced. A legal-specific tool answering from a real corpus is far safer than a general chatbot, but the rule stands regardless of tool: if you have not opened the authority and read it, do not cite it. The same applies to quotations from a document — verify against the page, not the summary.
How to pick legal AI
Start with where the work happens. The tools that survive contact with a real practice are the ones that live inside Word, your document management system or your inbox, because a review tool that requires copying a contract into a browser gets used twice and then quietly dropped. Spellbook's whole advantage is that it is a Word add-in.
Then decide whether you need a legal corpus or a good reader. Research tools like CoCounsel are answering from licensed legal material, which is what you want when the question is what the law says. General models like Claude are answering from training data plus whatever you gave them, which is what you want when the question is what this specific 200-page agreement says. Using the second for the first is how fabricated citations end up in filings.
Price ranges further here than in any other profession on this site. A solo practitioner can get most of the value from a Word add-in and a note-taker for well under $150 a month combined. Firm-scale platforms are an order of magnitude above that and are sold, not bought — the listed figures are indicative and every real number comes out of a procurement conversation.
Confidentiality decides the rest. Client material in a consumer AI subscription is a professional conduct problem before it is a technical one. Check whether input is used for training, whether the vendor will sign what your insurer expects, and whether your jurisdiction's regulator has said anything about disclosure to clients.
AI for lawyers: common questions
Not sure which of these fits your work?
Describe the job in one sentence. You get three matches back, with reasons and real prices.
Find my AIAI for other professions
Looking for tools by what they do rather than who uses them? Start from the categories, search the full catalog with price filters, or describe the job on AI Match and get three suggestions with reasons.