An AI add-on to your existing Westlaw subscription. or a standalone platform that does not require one?

CoCounsel is not a standalone product. It requires an active Westlaw subscription, which means the cost of AI is layered on top of an already significant annual spend. often $50K–$300K+ before CoCounsel pricing is added. For small and mid-size firms, the total cost of entry can be prohibitive.

The scope of CoCounsel is primarily research-oriented. There is no native drafting assistant, no matter management, no document comparison workspace, and no persistent workflow layer that carries context from one task to the next. Each interaction is largely self-contained.

For teams evaluating legal AI as a way to transform how they work. not just how they search. CoCounsel's dependency on the Westlaw ecosystem and its research-first scope can feel constraining.

Irys is a standalone platform. There is no prerequisite subscription, no legacy system dependency, and no enterprise sales cycle required to get started. A team can sign up, start a 7-day free trial, and evaluate the product on real work.

More fundamentally, Irys is not an AI add-on to a research tool. It is a unified environment where research, drafting, document intelligence, and matter context are connected by design. Research informs drafting. Matter context persists. Work product compounds across sessions instead of resetting with every new query.

The pricing model reflects this difference: $299 per seat per month, transparent and self-serve. No bundled upsells, no opaque enterprise contracts, no requirement to buy a separate platform just to access the AI.

CoCounsel requires an active Westlaw subscription. Westlaw runs $50,000 to $300,000+ annually depending on firm size and practice-area access, and CoCounsel pricing is layered on top. Total cost of ownership is the bundle, not just the AI line.

Like other wrapper-based legal AI, CoCounsel pays frontier-lab list rates on every query and sits inside Thomson Reuters' multi-product enterprise contract structure. That has two consequences for renewal. First, intro pricing on the AI add-on can reprice when the master Westlaw contract renews, when seats are added, or when usage tiers shift. Second, in April 2026 Anthropic moved Claude Enterprise to per-token billing, setting the precedent across the foundation-model market. CoCounsel has not introduced per-token billing yet, but the structural pressure is real. The number you sign today is not necessarily the number at year two.

Irys is one product, one number, one renewal cycle. $299 per seat per month, every module, every matter, no token billing, no underlying-platform requirement. The proprietary infrastructure absorbs the work before any model is called. Annual customers lock in the rate. We are the partner, not an add-on inside a larger contract.

Full breakdown with methodology and sources: irys.ai/blog/real-decision-harvey-legora-claude-irys

CoCounsel makes Westlaw smarter. That is genuine value for firms already committed to the Thomson Reuters stack. But for teams asking whether they need a smarter research tool or an entirely new kind of legal work platform, the answer may point somewhere else.

Irys is built on the thesis that legal AI should not be an add-on to an existing product. it should be the product. A platform where every capability is designed to work together, context carries forward, and the total cost of ownership is clear from day one.