Most "best legal AI" lists are written for the AmLaw 200. If you are a solo or a 2–5 attorney firm, the calculus is different: you are paying out of your own pocket, you do a bit of everything, and you do not have a procurement team to negotiate an enterprise contract. This guide rates the field on the terms that actually matter to a small practice — total cost, whether you can sign up without a sales call, and whether the tool does more than one job.

How to think about it

Legal AI tools cluster into three buckets, and most firms waste money by buying from the wrong one:

Research-grounded assistants — CoCounsel (Westlaw), Lexis+ AI (Shepard's), Clio Work (the vLex Vincent corpus). Excellent retrieval; priced accordingly.
Drafting specialists — Spellbook lives inside Microsoft Word and is built for transactional contract work.
BigLaw platforms — Harvey is a strong product aimed at large firms, at roughly $1,000+ per attorney per month with seat minimums.

A solo generalist usually needs a little of each, plus the unglamorous practice-management glue — conflicts, deadlines, time entries — that the pure-AI tools skip.

The honest price ladder

Verified ranges as of mid-2026, so you can anchor your budget:

Draftiro — free plan with no card; paid from $29/mo (Starter), $89/mo (Solo).
Spellbook — roughly $100–$300 per seat per month (contracts-in-Word, 7-day trial).
Clio Work — around $199 per user per month.
CoCounsel — roughly $225–$500 per user per month.
Lexis+ AI — typically around $200–$400 per attorney per month, on annual contracts.
Harvey — roughly $1,000+ per attorney per month, enterprise procurement.

We don't publish a price for Paxton AI: a commonly-repeated figure for it could not be verified, and we won't cite a competitor number we can't stand behind.

What a solo actually needs

Drafting that cites real law. Hallucinated citations are a sanctions risk. Use a tool that validates case cites against a real database — Draftiro checks every case citation against the public CourtListener corpus and flags statutes and rules as "unchecked" so you know to confirm them.
Conflict checks you can defend. A disciplinary reviewer wants a record of who searched, what was searched, and what was decided — not "I remembered to check."
Deadline math that survives a holiday. Court-day counting under FRCP 6 and the relevant state rule, with the right judicial-holiday set.
Honest billing. ABA Formal Opinion 512 says you bill the time you spend, not the time you saved. A clean AI-assisted time entry keeps that defensible.
A data posture you can explain to a client. Draftiro runs on the paid Google Gemini tier, which is contractually prohibited from training on your inputs — so "your data never trains AI models" is a claim we can actually make.

Our recommendation

If your bottleneck is deep appellate research and you already pay for Westlaw or Lexis, keep CoCounsel or Lexis+ AI for the research and add a workspace for everything else. If your bottleneck is contracts and you live in Word, Spellbook is a fair pick — though Draftiro ships a Word add-in too. For most solo generalists, the right answer is an AI-first workspace that does drafting, research, conflicts, and deadlines together, starting free. See the full side-by-side comparisons or jump to Draftiro vs Clio Work, vs CoCounsel, or vs Spellbook.

No tool replaces your judgment. The point is to stop paying BigLaw prices for features a solo practice never uses.