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

Published or commonly quoted figures from our mid-2026 reviews, so you can anchor your budget — check each vendor's current pricing before you buy:

Draftiro — free plan with no card; paid from $29/mo (Starter), $89/mo (Solo).
Spellbook — no public price we could verify (contracts-in-Word); ask for a quote.
Clio Work — around $199 per user per month.
CoCounsel — Essentials listed from $340.85/mo (Thomson Reuters plan page, September 2026).
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. When Draftiro detects a supported case citation, it can attempt a check against the public CourtListener corpus when available; statutes and rules remain "unchecked" for your confirmation.
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 does not use your matter content to train AI models, and the Google Gemini paid-service terms it uses bar Google from using your prompts and responses to improve its products. Google may still keep requests for a limited period for abuse monitoring; our Privacy Policy explains what providers retain.

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.