Hardly any small law firm has an IT department or a spare associate to babysit software. That is why the legal market has become one of the most crowded corners of AI tooling, and why the pricing inside it varies so wildly. Some platforms fold AI into a practice-management seat; others charge upwards of $499 per user per month for a single assistant. Here is what the 2026 crop does, and what each one costs.
What AI Actually Does Inside a Law Firm
The work splits into four jobs. Research — finding and checking authority. Drafting — pushing out first drafts of letters, clauses and standard filings. Documents — turning client data into the right form, or reading a record for the facts that matter. And matter admin — the timekeeping, billing and file chores that eat evenings.
Two cautions. Every tool below still assumes a qualified lawyer checks its output: AI that cites authority can cite it wrongly, and the duty of candour does not transfer to software. Confidentiality obligations also still apply, so check what a vendor does with your data before you paste in a client file.
1. Clio — AI Wired Into the Matter Record
Clio is the largest practice-management platform aimed at small firms, and its AI sits inside the matter. From the Core plan up, it drafts bills from parameters you set once, converts documents into calendar events and tasks confirmed against the source, drafts client updates from matter activity, and builds reports on request.
Clio publishes clio.com starting at $49 per user for Starter — which has no AI. Core, Signature and Elite go through a “Get pricing” form or a demo. Clio also owns Clio Draft (formerly Lawyaw) for court forms and templates, priced per user the same way.
Why it made the list: the AI is attached to live matter data, which is where its value actually comes from.
2. MyCase — 8am IQ Included in the Seat Price
MyCase bundles its AI under the name 8am IQ rather than selling it as a bolt-on: a writing and document assistant, a case assistant, and document discovery with 5,000 pages per user per month. For a firm that wants intake, matters, billing and payments in one place, it is the simplest packaging here.
Per-user pricing is published on mycase.com: Basic $50 per month billed annually ($60 monthly), Pro $100 ($120), Advanced $130 ($150). MyCase Accounting is a separate add-on, and LawPay, its payments arm, carries no monthly fee. The free trial needs no credit card.
Why it made the list: published prices and AI included, rather than an upsell you discover later.
3. Smokeball — Archie and Automatic Time Capture
Smokeball’s assistant, Archie, works inside existing workflows: drafting correspondence and surfacing matter details, scoped by permissions. The feature that sells it hardest is automatic time capture, which picks up billable activity from documents, emails and calls the firm already handles — the quietest cause of lost revenue in a small practice.
Smokeball publishes no price. Its own FAQ on smokeball.com says cost depends on users, plan, contract term and optional products, and routes you to a quote. Ask for migration costs in writing before you commit.
Why it made the list: the strongest time-capture story here — if you can get a number out of them.
4. Filevine — Built for Litigation Teams
Filevine is aimed at litigation-heavy practices rather than generalists. Its AI handles agent-assisted drafting in Word with standards-enforced redlining and recommendations linked back to the source, natural-language questions answered from the matter file, live deposition transcription with post-deposition summaries, and automated case timelines.
No price is published on filevine.com — its pricing page says packages are “custom built for your team’s needs” and offers no figures. There is no published self-serve trial either.
Why it made the list: the deepest litigation-specific AI here, and the least transparent on price.
5. Spellbook — Contract Redlining Where You Already Work
Spellbook lives inside Microsoft Word, where contracts actually get edited. It reviews and redlines agreements, suggests alternate clause language, keeps a clause library, and answers questions across documents through an “Associate” agent that can work through several files at once.
Pricing at spellbook.com is custom, structured around the number of users. It does publish a 7-day free trial, the honest way to find out whether its redlines match how your firm drafts.
Why it made the list: it improves the tool your associates already have open, with no new place to work.
6. Paxton AI — One Seat, Broad Coverage, Published Price
Paxton positions itself as an all-in-one legal AI assistant: drafting documents, clauses and correspondence, research across a knowledge base of US federal regulations, state law and case law for all fifty states, file analysis and summarisation, and medical chronologies and billing summaries for personal injury work.
The price is public on paxton.ai: $499 per user per month, or $2,999 per user per year — a saving of 50% against monthly billing. Firm-wide access is custom volume pricing, and a 7-day free trial needs no sales contact.
Why it made the list: the clearest published figure for a genuinely broad legal AI seat.
7. Midpage — Research With an AI Citator at $100 a Month
Midpage covers research and drafting with an AI citator that flags whether the authority you are leaning on is still good law, agentic PACER access for federal filings, and browser plugins. The citator is the part worth attention: negative treatment is exactly the thing a fast first draft tends to miss.
It publishes midpage.ai at $100 per month for one seat before tax, with a $25 law student rate and a free trial tier that needs no card. For a solo or two-lawyer firm, that is the lowest credible entry point here.
Why it made the list: the cheapest credible research-and-citator seat in this roundup.
8. Gavel — Document Automation With a Published Entry Price
Gavel, formerly Documate, generates the documents a firm builds over and over: intake answers turned into Word files and fillable PDFs, reusable templates, and Gavel Exec, which reviews contracts in Word or the browser. For firms whose recurring cost is form-filling, this is the job to automate first.
Prices are published on gavel.io: Lite $83 per month, Standard $165 billed annually ($210 monthly), Pro $290, and team plans from $417. You can start free without a card, and paid plans carry a 7-day trial.
Why it made the list: a published entry price and a free start, which is rarer here than it should be.
Three More Worth Knowing
Clearbrief hyperlinks every factual assertion in a brief to the source record and reviews a record for the strongest supporting evidence. It publishes $300 per user per month for its Solo plan, with custom pricing for enterprise volume. CoCounsel, Thomson Reuters’ assistant, covers research, document review and drafting grounded in Westlaw content, but publishes no price; it sells through its sales team. Alexi does research memos, drafting, document analysis and workflow agents from a firm’s own playbooks, and publishes no pricing page; its trial is gated behind a consultation.
The pattern is worth naming: the more a tool promises, the less likely it is to tell you what it costs.
How to Choose Without Getting Sold a Demo
Start with the job that costs you the most hours, not the tool that demos best. If your evenings are lost to timekeeping and billing, a platform with AI in the seat price beats a standalone assistant. If you are drowning in a case record, the tools that read documents come first.
Three questions to ask in writing, because none of these answers are on the pricing pages: the per-user price at your actual seat count rather than the entry tier; migration and onboarding cost; and whether AI usage is capped, since some plans meter discovery pages or research queries and the cap decides your real bill. For a benchmark, PracticePanther publishes $49 to $114 per user per month billed annually and advertises no AI feature at all.
The Honest Takeaway
Legal AI in 2026 ranges from $49 per user per month bundled into practice management, through $83 to $300 per month for standalone drafting and research, to $499 per user per month at the top. Nearly every tool here offers a free trial, so trial one product against one real matter from your own files before you talk to a sales team.
The discipline that matters is not which tool you pick. It is verifying what it produces, every time, the way you would check a junior’s first draft — and treating any vendor that will not put per-user pricing in writing as a firm that has something to hide about its invoice.