Free legal AI tools in 2026: what the free tiers actually include
"Free" does a lot of work in this market. It covers permanent plans you can run a business on, seven-day trials, demos gated behind a form, and freemium tiers that stop at the point the tool becomes useful. Of the 62 tools we track, two run a genuinely permanent free plan.
What is actually free, permanently
| Tool | What the free plan covers | Where it stops |
|---|---|---|
| GenieAI | Drafting and clause-level risk review with no time limit | Volume and advanced review; Pro is $75 a month |
| Termly | One basic policy and 10,000 cookie banner views | Multiple policies; Starter is $10 per site a month |
That is the whole list. Every other free offer on this site is time-limited.
Trials, and how long you get
| Tool | Trial | Card required |
|---|---|---|
| Xakia | 14 days | No |
| Spellbook | 7 days | Not stated |
| Rocket Lawyer | 7 days, on all three plans | Yes |
| Gavel | 7 days on the first three tiers | Not stated |
| Clio Manage | Offered; length not published | Not stated |
| Josef | Offered; length not published | Not stated |
Fourteen days without a card is the most generous arrangement here, and it is the only one that lets you evaluate without a diary reminder and a cancellation. Seven days is enough to test whether a tool works on your documents; it is not enough to test whether your team will adopt it.
The categories with nothing free at all
Six of the eleven categories we cover have no free tier and no published trial anywhere in them: contract management, eDiscovery, legal spend, entity management, compliance monitoring and IP portfolio management. In each, evaluation means a sales process and usually a demo environment built for you.
That is not vendors being obstructive. These tools do nothing useful until they hold your data, and loading a representative sample is itself a project. It does mean that in those categories the phrase "free trial" in a search result is almost always a listing site rather than the vendor.
The general-model option
Worth naming because it is what most small businesses reach for first: a general assistant will explain what a clause means for pennies per document. Mistral publishes usage pricing from $0.02 per million tokens, and the consumer tiers of the major assistants are free.
What a general model cannot do is remember the positions you accepted last time, tell you what is missing from a contract rather than what is in it, or leave a record of what it advised. For reading one contract it is the right tool. For signing the same agreement repeatedly and wanting consistency, it is not.
How to use a trial properly
- Run it on your worst document, not the vendor's sample. Extraction and review quality on a badly scanned or unusually drafted agreement is the entire difference between a useful tool and an expensive one.
- Give it to the person who will actually use it. A trial driven by the person who chose the tool tells you nothing about adoption.
- Test the thing you are worried about. If your fear is missing a renewal, check the reminder actually fires, rather than admiring the review output.
- Note the card requirement and set a diary reminder the day before it lapses. Rocket Lawyer's trial requires a card on all three plans.
- Ask what happens to your documents when the trial ends, and whether they are deleted on request.
Method
Free plans and trials are taken from each vendor's own pricing page, checked in September 2026. Where a vendor states a trial exists without publishing its length, we say so rather than assuming the usual fourteen days. Trials that require a sales conversation to start are not counted as trials here, because they are demos.