A practical alternative to Harvey and Legora for in-house legal teams
If you lead a legal or commercial team inside a business, most of your week is probably spent on contracts. NDAs, supply and services agreements, licences, the odd lease or employment contract, and a steady flow of markups from counterparties who would like better terms. You have probably looked at Harvey or Legora, and both have a credible in-house story. The useful question is not whether they are capable. It is whether your team needs what they are built to do.
Breadth you may not use
Harvey and Legora are broad platforms. They cover legal research, large-scale document review, litigation, regulatory monitoring and a long list of practice areas, and they count some of the largest legal departments in the world among their customers. That breadth is genuinely valuable to a team that runs disputes, investigations and multi-jurisdictional research alongside its contracts. Legora has also started to court smaller in-house teams, which is a fair sign of where demand is heading.
For a team whose work is overwhelmingly commercial agreements, though, much of that breadth sits unused. You tend to pay for it either way.
What an in-house contracts team actually needs
Four things usually matter more than the length of the feature list.
Work that stays in Word. Your lawyers and contract managers draft, comment and track changes in Word. A tool that lives there gets used. One that asks people to move into a separate portal tends to get used by its enthusiasts and nobody else.
A budget you can state in advance. In-house legal is a cost centre, and finance will want a number. Per-user pricing published on a page is easier to defend than a quote that arrives after several weeks of meetings, or a usage bill that depends on how busy the quarter turned out to be.
Knowledge that stays when people leave. In a small team, the reason you accepted a particular liability cap with a key supplier often lives in one person's head. When they move on, the next renewal starts from scratch.
Adoption without a legal operations function. Few in-house teams have knowledge management or legal ops staff to configure playbooks and run a rollout. The tool has to earn its place in the ordinary course of the work.
The right legal AI for a contracts team is the one that remembers what the team agreed last time.
Keeping what the team learns
This is the point most worth pressing in any demo. Many tools help you produce a draft and stop there. Scriptum captures clause choices, negotiation positions and deal outcomes as your team works, and keeps them as a record your organisation owns. When a counterparty pushes back on your standard indemnity, you can see where the team landed last time and why. That record does not leave with a departing lawyer, and nobody has to maintain it. It builds up through normal drafting in Word.
Where Scriptum fits
Scriptum is built only for transactional work. It is a Microsoft Word add-in, not a separate portal, and it drafts from your own templates, precedents and house style rather than generic text. Drafts can be shared in one secure workspace with colleagues and the other side, with approval flows that mirror your reporting lines, so nothing goes out without the right sign-off. Incoming markups get an instant redline and an issues list, and the positions you take feed a clause library that belongs to you.
Pricing is published, from £79 per user per month, with no implementation fees, no minimum seats and no multi-year commitment. There is no configuration project to complete before you see results, and teams can be working with it in weeks rather than months.
None of this makes Harvey or Legora the wrong choice for a large legal department with a broad remit. But if your team spends its days on contracts rather than courtrooms, it is worth seeing what a narrower tool can do. Book a demo and we will walk through a live matter with you.