Best Legal AI Under $300 per Seat 2026

Irys is the only litigation-grade, legal-native platform on this list with a transparent price under $300. One number, $299 per seat per month, includes research across 50 million cases, drafting with tracked changes in Word, document review, and matter memory that persists for the life of a case. There are no usage caps, no token billing, and no seat minimum.

A 14-day free trial, no credit card, lets a firm test Irys on real matters before paying, and a capped Lite tier exists for lighter evaluation.

MyCase IQ folds AI into MyCase's practice-management tiers rather than charging for it separately. The Writing and Document assistants start on the Pro tier at $100 per user per month (annual), with the Case and Discovery assistants on Advanced at $130. A 10-day trial needs no card. For a small firm that wants AI help where it already runs its matters and billing, the value is strong.

It is not a legal-research or litigation-drafting platform. The AI assists with drafting and document tasks inside MyCase; there is no Word add-in and no case-law citation grounding, so it sits below Irys on legal capability while winning on bundled price.

Clio Duo is Clio's AI layer, sold as an add-on to a paid Clio Manage subscription. Independent 2026 sourcing puts the add-on around $49 to $59 per user per month on top of the base plan, though Clio keeps the exact figure behind a demo, so it is listed as quote-gated with a sourced estimate. For the large base of firms already on Clio, it is a low-friction way to add AI.

As with MyCase, the AI is assistive inside the practice-management suite. There is no Word add-in and no independent case-law grounding, and you must already pay for Clio to use it, so the all-in cost depends on your existing plan.

Spellbook is the best-known AI inside Microsoft Word, built for transactional work: drafting, reviewing, and redlining contracts against your playbooks. It is widely adopted and easy to roll out, and third-party estimates put it in a mid-range band, which is why it appears on a budget list. But Spellbook does not publish a public price, so the true per-seat cost is a quote.

For litigation it does little: no motions or briefs, no discovery tooling, and no case-law research or cite-checking. As a value pick it is narrow, strong for contracts, silent on price, and not a fit for litigators.

Claude is the strongest low-cost general drafter here. Pro runs about $17 to $20 a month, and a free tier exists. With Projects you can upload a matter's documents and have Claude write grounded in those files, which helps on fact-heavy first drafts and keeps cost minimal.

It is not a legal tool. Claude grounds on your uploaded files, not on validated case law, so any external citation must be verified. In independent testing, general-purpose models hallucinated on 58 to 82 percent of legal queries. Cheap and capable for drafting, but you supply the legal safety.

ChatGPT is the lowest-cost option most lawyers already have: free, or $20 a month for Plus. It writes and edits quickly and is useful at the first-draft stage.

For legal work it carries the highest risk on this list. It does not check citations against any law database, and general models hallucinated on 58 to 82 percent of legal queries in independent testing, the source of the sanctions lawyers now read about. Cheapest in dollars, most expensive in review time and risk if used unchecked.

Mike is a free, open-source legal AI you self-host, paying only for your own model API usage. It drafts, edits, and reviews documents and can check case law through an optional CourtListener integration. For a technical user with zero budget, nothing here is cheaper.

The trade-offs are real: you run and secure it yourself, there are no security certifications, and its own creator concedes it lacks the case-law database depth serious litigation needs. Free in license, but it costs setup, maintenance, and your own compliance burden.

GC AI is included for honesty: it is a capable in-house tool with a native Word add-in and character-level citations, but at a published $500 per seat per month it sits above this list's $300 ceiling. We show the real number rather than hide it.

If budget is the constraint, it is out of range. If it is not, GC AI competes on features rather than price, and even then it is an in-house assistant, not a litigation platform.

Paxton is transparent about price, $499 per user per month or $2,999 a year, which is why it can be placed precisely: over this list's line. It is matter-aware and runs an AI Citator that reads whether a case is still good law, useful features, but not budget ones.

Its often-quoted 94 percent accuracy is a vendor self-test against a separate dataset, not an independent benchmark, and its Word integration is not confirmed in its own docs. A good tool on the wrong list for a sub-$300 budget.

CoCounsel is a strong tool, but it cannot be confirmed under $300. Thomson Reuters retired the affordable Casetext standalone (about $225 a month) in March 2025, and pricing now runs through a configurator or sales quote with no public number. It earns a place here only to show what opacity costs a budget buyer.

Its strengths are real, grounding in Westlaw and Practical Law and solid review coverage, but for a firm shopping by price, a tool you cannot price is hard to choose.

Lexis+ AI (now Lexis+ with Protege) is a strong research tool, but its price is quote-only, so it cannot be placed under $300 with any confidence. It is on this list to be honest about the gap between its quality and its pricing transparency.

It grounds answers in LexisNexis content and Shepard's and posted the best accuracy in the independent Stanford study (still hallucinating on more than 17 percent of queries). For a budget buyer, an unpriced enterprise product plus a separate Word add-in is the opposite of an all-in number.

Harvey is built for large firms and prices accordingly. There is no public number, no trial, and reported seat minimums around twenty, with community-leaked figures far above $300 per seat. For a budget list, it is the clearest example of a tool a small firm cannot actually buy at this price.

The capability is real, but the go-to-market is enterprise, so on a sub-$300 list it ranks last among the opaque tools.

Legora is capable on document-heavy work, but it is fully sales-gated: no public price, no free tier, and a reported ten-seat minimum, with early third-party figures well above a budget threshold. On a sub-$300 list it lands with the other opaque enterprise tools.

For a firm choosing by transparent price, there is nothing here to evaluate without a sales call.