What legal software costs by category in 2026
Our price index lists what each tool costs. This page asks a different question: what does a category cost, and how likely is anyone in it to tell you? Both answers are drawn from the same 62 tools, and the second one turns out to be more useful than expected.
The short version
Of 62 tools we track, 15 publish a rate card, 24 have a reported figure we could source, and 23 have neither. That is the headline, and it hides the more interesting pattern: transparency is not spread evenly. It clusters by how commoditised the category is.
| Category | Tools | Publish a price | Reported only | Neither |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Electronic signature | 7 | 4 | 3 | 0 |
| Entity management | 6 | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| Contract drafting | 7 | 3 | 4 | 0 |
| Contract review | 8 | 2 | 5 | 1 |
| Matter management | 6 | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| IP management | 6 | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| Legal spend | 6 | 1 | 1 | 4 |
| Contract management (CLM) | 8 | 1 | 4 | 3 |
| Legal research | 6 | 0 | 3 | 3 |
| Compliance monitoring | 6 | 0 | 2 | 4 |
| eDiscovery | 6 | 0 | 3 | 3 |
Electronic signature is the most transparent category on this site: four of its seven tools publish a rate card. Not one tool in eDiscovery, legal research or compliance monitoring publishes anything. The gap is not about company size or deal value, because all three contain vendors of every scale.
Why signature publishes and eDiscovery does not
Signing a document is the same job for every buyer. There is little to configure, the value does not vary much with who you are, and a competitor is one search away. In that position a published price wins deals, because the alternative is losing them to whoever answers the question first.
eDiscovery is the opposite. The bill depends on data volume nobody can forecast at the point of sale, the same matter can cost several times more or less depending on how the collection was scoped, and every deal is negotiated. Publishing a rate would invite a comparison the vendor cannot control.
That is the honest explanation, and it only goes so far. It does not explain why entity management, where the bill depends on entity count, manages to publish while legal spend, where the bill depends on invoice volume, does not. Both price on a countable unit. One tells you the rate.
What each category actually costs
Ranges below are the span between the cheapest and most expensive entry point we could source in each category, published or reported. They are a way to tell a $200 a month decision from a $200,000 a year one, not a quote.
| Category | Entry point | Upper end | Priced on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Electronic signature | $10 per user/mo (DocuSign) | $40 per user/mo | Users |
| Contract drafting | Free, then $75/mo (GenieAI) | ~$450 per user/mo (Wordsmith) | Users |
| Contract review | Free, then $75/mo (GenieAI) | ~$290,000/yr (Harvey) | Users or firm size |
| Matter management | $100 per user/mo (Xakia) | ~$12,500/mo (Onit) | Users, then platform |
| IP management | $60/mo up to 50 matters (Alt Legal) | Six figures (Anaqua) | Matter or portfolio count |
| Entity management | $5,000/yr up to 100 entities (EntityKeeper) | $25,000/yr and up (Athennian) | Entity count |
| Contract management (CLM) | ~$39/mo (Contractbook) | ~$250,000/yr (Ironclad) | Contract volume |
| Legal research | ~$3,000 per user/yr (Lexis+ AI) | ~$290,000/yr (Harvey) | Users |
| Compliance monitoring | ~$50,000/yr (LogicGate) | ~$200,000/yr | Admin users and inventory |
| Legal spend | $100 per user/mo (Xakia) | ~$12,500/mo (Onit) | Users, or spend under management |
| eDiscovery | ~$11 per GB/mo (Relativity) | ~$30 per GB/mo plus seats | Data volume |
The unit matters more than the rate
Four categories price on something other than users, and in each of them the unit does more to your bill than the rate does.
- eDiscovery prices per gigabyte hosted. A case that collects broadly and culls late costs several times what the same review costs after a tight collection, at an identical rate.
- Entity management and IP management price in bands. EntityKeeper covers up to 100 entities for $5,000 a year and up to 200 for $10,000, so incorporating a 101st entity doubles the bill.
- CLM prices on contract volume rather than seats, which means growth in the business raises the bill even when the legal team does not change.
- Legal spend management is sometimes priced on spend under management, so the cost rises with the thing you bought the tool to reduce.
What to do with this
- In a category with published prices, get a written quote and compare it against the rate card. A quote materially above list needs explaining.
- In a category with none, put a benchmarkable vendor into the same process. Ironclad's reported median near $40,000 rests on 363 recorded purchases, and Luminance publishes a list price. Having either in the room gives you a reference point.
- Ask what the billing unit is before asking what the rate is, and model three years of growth against that unit rather than today's headcount.
- Ask for the annual escalator in writing at signature. Reported escalators of 5 to 10% compound: a $100,000 contract reaches $121,000 by year three with nothing else changing.
- Ask what the implementation fee is. In entity management it is routinely a fixed proportion of the annual subscription, and it is rarely mentioned first.
Method
Every figure comes from the vendor's own pricing page where one exists, checked in September 2026, or from reported marketplace and procurement data where it does not. Reported figures are labelled as such throughout. Vendors we could source no figure for are counted in the "neither" column rather than dropped, because a category's opacity is part of what the table is measuring.
Category membership follows the guide each tool leads on, so a tool appearing in several categories is counted in each. Full per-tool detail, including the tier structures behind these ranges, is on the price index.