A firm of eighteen solicitors does not have a procurement function, and should not pretend to have one. What it has is a managing partner, a practice manager, a COLP who is probably also fee-earning, and a limited appetite for meetings about software. The Law Society's 'Buying New Technology' guide, published in March 2026 and aimed at small and medium-sized practices, sets out four steps: write a brief, research suppliers, negotiate the contract, then embed and evaluate. The steps are sound. What follows is how to run them in a fortnight rather than a quarter.
Write the brief as one matter, not a wish list
The usual failure is a brief that lists capabilities: research, drafting, review, summarisation, everything. A list like that cannot be tested, so every product appears to satisfy it and the decision falls back to whoever gave the best demonstration.
Write instead about a piece of work your firm did last month, in specific terms. The forty-lease portfolio review that took a paralegal nine days. The relief from forfeiture question that a partner researched twice because the first note went missing. Then ask each supplier to show you that work. A brief that names a real matter is a test. A brief that names capabilities is a shopping list.
Supplier research, honestly conducted
The market has a shape worth knowing before you start. Harvey sells primarily to large firms and enterprises and does not publish list pricing. Legora markets an agent product and Monitors for regulatory change, and does not publish list pricing either. CoCounsel is built on Thomson Reuters' Westlaw and Practical Law content, Lexis+ AI on LexisNexis content. Spellbook, Definely, Luminance and Robin AI market contract review.
That distribution tells you something useful: a good deal of the market is built for firms with procurement functions, and a good deal of the rest is built around a single task. A twenty-lawyer general practice is not the centre of anybody's roadmap, so the question to hold onto is not which product is best. It is which product can be bought, tried and abandoned without a governance process.
Seat minimums, and what card payment changes
Ask early whether there is a seat minimum and an annual commitment, because that single answer determines whether this is a purchase or a project. A twenty-seat annual minimum turns a decision worth a few thousand pounds into one that needs a partners' vote, a security questionnaire and a champion whose credibility is now attached to the outcome.
Card payment with no minimum changes the risk profile completely. It means the firm can be wrong cheaply. Our own plans are Starter at about £31 per seat per month excluding VAT, charged in USD at $39, Pro on your own provider key at the same level with no platform AI credits, Premium at about £78 ($99) with 12,000 credits per seat per month and every agent, and Business at about £157 ($199) with 25,000 credits, audit log export and retention controls. Free gives two seats and 500 welcome credits, which expire after thirty days, with no card at all.
What to test in a twenty-minute walkthrough
Bring one real question from a live matter and one document you know well. Then test four things and ignore the rest of the demonstration. One: ask the question and look at where the answer says it looked, then open one source yourself. Two: ask about something obscure enough that the honest answer is uncertainty, and watch whether the product says so or produces confident prose.
Three: ask what happens when a citation cannot be confirmed, and ask to see it happen rather than be told about it. Four: ask to see the record the run leaves behind, and ask who can read it. A supplier who can show you all four in twenty minutes has built the thing they are describing. A supplier who needs to arrange a follow-up session with a specialist may not have.
Nine questions to send in writing
Written answers are worth more than a call, because they can be circulated to the partnership and read again in a year. Ask: which sources may the tool cite from, and can I see the list. What happens when it cannot confirm an authority. Where is our data stored, and is it used to train any model. Can we use our own model provider key. What certifications do you hold today, not in progress.
Then: what record does the system keep of each run, and can we export it. Is there a seat minimum or an annual commitment. What does a typical month cost for a team of ten, with the arithmetic shown. And finally, what should we not use this for. That last question is the most revealing on the list, because a supplier who has no answer to it has not thought about your risk, only about their sale.
Our own answers, since we are asking you to ask
Sources: a fixed list of 74 approved public primary-law and regulator sources, with ten paywalled domains refused by name. Unconfirmed authorities carry needs a check or not found, never a quiet pass. Data sits in the Microsoft Azure UK region, encrypted in transit and at rest, and is never used to train any model. You can bring your own provider key on every plan, including Free. Credentials are encrypted field by field.
Certifications: none. No ISO 27001, no SOC 2, no Cyber Essentials today, and we say so rather than pointing at a roadmap. Records: every run goes to the audit and compliance register with who authorised it, whether checks passed and credits drawn, exportable as a spreadsheet. Commitment: none, no seat minimums, card payment. What not to use it for: US, Canadian or Australian law, anything depending on a live DMS connector, and anything where you need ethical walls as a technical control.
Embed and evaluate, which is the step firms skip
The Law Society's fourth step is the one that decides whether the money was well spent, and it is the one nobody diarises. Set a date three months out, before you buy, and write down now what you expect to be true by then. Two or three measurable things: the lease review takes two days rather than nine, or the research note gets written once.
Then actually hold the meeting, and be willing to stop. A tool that four people use and eleven ignore is not embedded, and the honest response is either to find out why or to cancel it. Card-payable plans make that decision cheap, which is the main argument for buying that way in the first place.
The honest edge
Buying without procurement works when the risk is small and reversible. It is the wrong approach if your firm holds data that requires a negotiated information-security schedule, or if a client's outside-counsel terms require certifications from your suppliers. In that case, run the full process, whoever you buy from, and expect it to take months.
Our lack of certifications is a genuine reason for some firms to say no to us, and we would rather that happened at the start than after a security questionnaire. A credit is roughly a penny of model usage, and a full research run can cost into the low hundreds of credits, so a firm running heavy research every day should do the arithmetic on its own volumes rather than trusting a per-seat headline.
