Finding the Right AI Tool for Your Law Firm

With an almost infinite number of artificial intelligence (AI) choices to improve your law firm’s efficiency, how do you choose? I like to think that choosing an AI platform is comparable to online dating. What am I looking for? What effect is this commitment going to have on my daily life? How much of my time (and money) is this going to cost me? What are the downfalls? In this article, I will explore the differences between full AI integration and task-specific AI, how they change your firm, what ethical challenges they present, and how they compare in cost.

Finding the Perfect AI Match

Let’s journey back to the time when online dating first made its way into the world. Sites such as Match.com and eHarmony were created for individuals who did not have the time or resources to spend every weekend out and about trying to meet their soulmate. Predictably, dating apps such as Tinder soon followed, with a focus not on the meaningful search for a life partner but rather on a never-ending catalog of men and women looking for a good time.

What does this have to do with AI? Well, whether you are choosing a dating app or an effective AI platform for your firm, you should go into the decision-making process with an understanding of what you want to achieve. Are you ready to settle down and find someone who compliments your lifestyle and makes you whole, or are you looking instead for someone who can help fill some voids in your life but will not necessarily become your whole life?

AI Legal Assistants: Looking for Mr. Right

Much as singles searching for a soulmate might turn to Match.com and eHarmony, law firms looking for a holistic AI solution might want to start with platforms such as Clio, Microsoft Co-Pilot, and Supio. These three AI law firm management platforms help with the tasks and nuances of your legal lives to become your “better half.”

Are you looking for a partner who can complete you? Clio is a holistic AI option that aids in almost every administrative aspect of running a law firm, including client management, document management, time and expense tracking, billing and invoicing, calendaring, and trust accounting.

Are you looking for a partner who is a bit more familiar? Microsoft Co-Pilot works within the Microsoft Office suite of tools (Outlook, Word, Excel, etc.) and identifies the information you put into those tools to assist you with your everyday tasks. This system is available as an add-on for any law firm that already has Microsoft Office and is a great tool for firms who do not want to train a brand-new system.

Or perhaps it is important for you to narrow your search for a partner (think JDate). Supio is an AI platform designed specifically for personal injury law firms. It uses an OpenAI model to analyze and apply facts to individual personal injury cases, using in-platform record retrieval, medical chronologies, deposition transcripts, and actionable intelligence to add value to your legal services.

Task-Specific AI Tools: Looking for Mr. Right Now

If finding your law firm’s “better half” isn’t exactly what you are looking for—or if you aren’t quite sure where AI might fit into your practice—there are many task-specific platforms that allow you to test the waters before partnering up with a full-blown AI legal assistant as described above. Whether you are looking for help with contract review, brief drafting, demand preparation, legal research, document analysis, or scheduling—there’s a match!

EvenUp is the leading demand generation tool. With its “claims intelligence platform,” EvenUp analyzes documents from the entire case cycle to spot any missing pieces, creates medical chronologies, and puts together cohesive and thorough demand packages that the average personal injury attorney might not have the time to prepare on their own. As an added value, the staff at EvenUp are all great people to work with should you have the need. I have had the pleasure of meeting with and speaking with many staff members at conferences and conventions across the United States; it is always a helpful and enjoyable experience.

For your drafting needs outside of demands, Briefpoint can assist in your discovery documents. Briefpoint uses opposing counsel’s discovery documents to draft any piece of discovery you request. The AI platform can draft admission, requests for production, interrogatories, and more, as well as add your objections and responses, download, sign, and serve.

When it comes to conducting research, well, let’s not pretend that it is our favorite task. Finding the right case to complement your argument can be challenging. Thomson Reuters’s CoCounsel allows you to upload your completed briefs and have the platform find relevant case laws, statutes, and regulations by analyzing and understanding your position using a document intelligence platform trained by Thomson Reuters Practical Law attorney-editors. And the best part—it takes seconds!

How many hours a day or week do you and your staff take to analyze or chronologize legal documents, medical records, or police reports? The short answer is probably too many. AI tools such as Luminance allow you to upload multiple documents and train the system to understand them and flag any potential issues it finds. It is a learn-as-you-go platform, meaning its capabilities advance the more you upload. Contracts are just one of the many types of documents you can upload to Luminance.

Ironclad, another contract-smart AI tool, assists with the entire lifecycle of a contract. If you are a contract-focused attorney, you might find that Ironclad is the casual fling that turns into a serious romance, but for the majority of us who have a few contracts a week in the form of fee agreements, Ironclad will likely remain only an occasional hookup.

Last in our list of task-specific AI platforms, LawToolBox is there to assist with your scheduling and deadline needs and promises a beautiful world where attorneys never miss a deadline again. Goodbye, sleepless nights and Xanax prescriptions? LawToolBox works specifically with Microsoft 365. Just enter the case information, and the platform will calculate all the critical dates and update your Outlook calendar accordingly. Additionally, you can link with team members and share calendars so your whole legal team can see the fast-approaching deadlines. And, in case you need more push notifications in your life, you can set reminders to help keep everyone on track.

Love and Money

As with planning a night out on the town for a first date, searching for an AI platform will quickly reveal that nothing comes for free. Some options are cheaper than others, but ultimately, you and your firm must determine what they are worth. Let’s break down the cost.

There are two different models when it comes to purchasing. In the first model, you pay on a per-case basis, meaning you only pay for what you use. For example, at the National Trial Lawyers 2025 Summit, I sat down with Jen Raphael from Supio, who explained that their platform charges on a per-case basis, with fees ranging from roughly $250 to $750 based on such variables as case size, documentation size, and the amount of analysis needed.

The other payment model is a monthly subscription. In this model, you pay a set fee per user and get everything included in your plan (plans can vary here) for that time period. Generally, the more users you have and the longer the time period you commit to, the lower the per-month, per-user price. For example, LawToolBox offers plans ranging from $42 per month per user for two to nine users billed monthly, down to $19 per month per user for 80+ users billed annually. CoCounsel’s per-user, per-month pricing plans also decrease as the number of users and the length of the time commitment increase: Plans start at $247.08 per month for a single user billed monthly and decrease to a total of $1,786.40 per month for ten users with a three-year commitment (the monthly price goes up in the second and third years; for pricing on more than ten users, you must contact the Thomson Reuters sales department for a quote).

Some providers offer a mix of payment options. Briefpoint is available in a few different pricing categories, including $55 per document, $89 per month per user for up to nine users billed monthly, and $690 per month for ten or more users billed annually.

Obviously, the pricing list above is not complete. Some providers require you to enter a great deal of information about yourself and your law firm to get a quote online, and some do not even offer pricing without your talking to a sales representative. Putting together an analysis of law firm needs versus cost versus usage is not an easy task. But finding the right partner never is.

Guard Your Heart (and Your Law License)

To kick off this section, I feel that ChatGPT deserves a special mention. ChatGPT has been used countless times by attorneys and support staff alike, probably more than any other AI model available today. It can spit out just about anything you ask it to, in any tone, to any audience (flashback to the bar exam MPT section and the daunting audience request). But ChatGPT is a little like Tinder: Sometimes you get lucky and find exactly what you’re looking for, but if you’re not careful, you’ll wind up regretting your poor choices.

By now, we have all read the story of the New York attorney who was sanctioned after he used ChatGPT to write a legal brief that he submitted without realizing that it contained citations to six fictitious cases. Not surprisingly, following this event, the ethical use of AI has been a top concern. Two recent articles in the American Bar Association’s Law Practice magazine (“ The Evolution of Gen AI and Legal Ethics” by Melissa Heidrick and “ The Ethics and Regulation of AI” by Jayne R. Reardon and Tom Martin) presented guidelines for the reasonable usage of AI, including:

• Attorneys should not treat AI as a replacement for human judgment or legal expertise.
• Attorneys must disclose their use of AI to their clients and the court.
• Attorneys need to explore and understand the limitations of AI tools.
• Attorneys must take responsibility for whatever they produce with the help of AI.

We as attorneys have an ethical duty to our clients and the legal system to produce, review, and submit with responsibility our own work, even when the production of this work is made simpler by using AI. Don’t be a lousy date.

(For more on the ethical rules surrounding the use of AI, please see American Bar Association Model Rules of Professional Conduct 1.1, 1.4, 1.6, 1.15, and 5.3.)

The Right One Is Out There

Whether you’re looking for a happily ever after with the AI legal assistant of your dreams or a more limited AI system to scratch a particular law practice itch, remember that there are lots of fish in the sea. If you look hard enough, I assure you that you’ll find exactly what you are searching for.