Alternatives to Casetext (CoCounsel)

What you’re actually leaving

You cannot buy Casetext anymore. Thomson Reuters acquired it in 2023 for $650M, started redirecting casetext.com on February 1, 2025, and retired the standalone product on April 1, 2025. If you land here in 2026, you are one of two readers: a former subscriber who got migrated onto a Thomson Reuters contract and is now looking at a renewal number you did not sign up for, or someone who found “Casetext” on a review site with live pricing attached and needs to know what the actual shortlist is.

The thing worth naming precisely is what died. CoCounsel — the eight-skill legal AI assistant — is alive and shipping. What died was the buying motion: a solo attorney putting a credit card into a checkout page at roughly $200/user/month and working that same afternoon, with no Westlaw contract and no procurement cycle. Every option below is either a price increase on that motion or a different shape of product entirely. Pick based on which half of Casetext you actually valued.

Thomson Reuters CoCounsel — the successor, at roughly 3x

Thomson Reuters CoCounsel is the only path that preserves the CoCounsel skills your team already knows. Document review, deposition prep, contract analysis, research memos — same workflows, same output shape, now sold per attorney against the Westlaw corpus.

The cost is the story. Online pricing stops at 10 attorneys; above that you are in a sales cycle. For a five-attorney firm on a one-year term, CoCounsel Essentials runs about $1,464/month ($293/user/month), Westlaw Advantage with CoCounsel Essentials about $2,091/month ($418/user/month), and the full CoCounsel Legal suite about $2,462/month (~$492/user/month). A solo attorney taking All States & Federal coverage lands near $639/user/month. Against the old ~$200 standalone rate, that is a 1.5x to 3.2x increase depending on tier — and the cheaper end assumes you already pay for Westlaw separately. Longer terms cut it: 12% off at two years, 18% at three.

Pick it when: litigation and research are the core of the practice, Westlaw is already a line item, and the CoCounsel skills are wired into how associates work. You are buying continuity, and continuity is worth real money.

LexisNexis Protégé — the like-for-like on the other side of the divide

LexisNexis Protégé is the competitive answer to CoCounsel, and 2026 has been an active year for it: Lexis+ AI was renamed Lexis+ with Protégé in February, and Protégé Work shipped on May 7, 2026 — you describe a legal goal in natural language and it returns a structured plan you approve before it executes, across contract comparison, due diligence, and compliance review. Shepard’s validates citations inside the workflow. Vault holds up to 50 document sets of 1–500 documents each, and it connects to iManage, SharePoint, and NetDocuments.

Lexis does not publish a rate. Third-party quotes put the Lexis+ with Protégé bundle in a $128–$494/user/month band depending on scope, which overlaps CoCounsel almost exactly — this is not the cheaper option, it is the other option.

Pick it when: your research foundation is Lexis, not Westlaw. The migration is mostly about landing on the right database, and picking the wrong side means paying for a corpus your associates do not cite from.

Spellbook — the closest thing to the old price point

Spellbook runs inside Word and does transactional work: playbook-based redlining, clause benchmarking, drafting. Pricing is contact-sales with a 7-day trial, split into Law Firms and In-House tiers. Third-party bands put it around $99–$199/user/month for individual and team plans, with enterprise closer to $350/user/month against a 10-seat minimum and a six-month commitment; one verified-purchase dataset puts the median customer at about $25,470/year.

That entry band is the only option here that sits at or below what Casetext used to cost. The tradeoff is scope: Spellbook is not a research tool and will not replace a citator.

Pick it when: what you actually valued was self-serve legal AI at a small-firm price, and your work is contracts rather than briefs.

Legora — the fast-growing challenger

Legora is the entrant that changed the shortlist. It reached a $5.6B valuation in 2026 on a $600M Series D and crossed $100M ARR, and it competes on being Word-native: an assistant for research and document Q&A, a Word add-in for playbook redlining, and Tabular Review for pulling structured clause data across thousands of documents at once. Pricing is custom, starting around $250/user/month.

Pick it when: you have volume document review — diligence, portfolio-wide clause extraction — and you want the work to happen in the document rather than in a chat window beside it.

Harvey — only at firm scale

Harvey covers drafting, regulatory analysis, and matter-level orchestration with the governance controls large firms require. It is also the most expensive thing on this page: no published rate, reported seat pricing around $1,000–$1,200/month, annual contracts from $50K into the high six figures, and 25–50 seat minimums.

Pick it when: you are 200+ attorneys with AI use spread across practice areas and a procurement function to run the deal. At solo or five-attorney scale the seat minimum alone rules it out.

What’s not on this list and why

General assistants — Claude, ChatGPT — are absent from the ranked options because none of them ship a citator, and unverified citations are the failure mode that gets lawyers sanctioned. They are still the honest answer for a narrow slice of readers: if you used CoCounsel mainly for summarization and first-draft correspondence rather than research, a general assistant plus manual cite-checking costs a fraction of everything above.

Match rules

• Litigation-heavy, Westlaw already paid for, want the same skills → CoCounsel
• Lexis shop → Protégé
• Transactional work, small firm, price-sensitive → Spellbook
• High-volume document review and diligence → Legora
• 200+ attorneys, multi-practice AI, procurement in place → Harvey

If you cannot decide and budget allows the switching cost, default to Thomson Reuters CoCounsel. It is the lowest-retraining path, your matter history is already there, and you can move to Protégé or Spellbook at renewal once you know which half of the product your team actually uses.

When staying put is right

If Thomson Reuters migrated you onto a fixed-term promotional rate and that term has not expired, the switch usually does not pay yet. Run it out. The exception is if you already know the post-promotional number and it is above what Spellbook or Protégé would cost at your seat count — in that case start the evaluation now, because a six-month legal-AI procurement cycle started at renewal is a cycle you lose.

Migration cost

Two costs get underestimated. The first is renewal price shock: subscribers holding legacy Casetext rates have reported being moved onto fixed-term promotional pricing with no guaranteed renewal rate, so the number you pay today may not be the number you pay next year. Get the post-promotional rate in writing before you sign, not at renewal.

The second is the research corpus. Moving from Westlaw-anchored CoCounsel to Lexis-anchored Protégé is not a tool swap — it is a citation-practice change that touches every brief bank and every associate’s habits. Budget one to two quarters, not one weekend.

Watch-out

“Casetext” still appears in procurement spreadsheets, review-site listings, and comparison articles with live pricing attached. None of it is buyable. Guard: verify any Casetext line item against thomsonreuters.com before it enters a shortlist or a budget.