Should a transactional firm pay for an all-purpose legal AI platform?
Should a transactional firm pay for an all-purpose legal AI platform? For most firms of twenty to a hundred fee earners whose work is overwhelmingly contracts and deals, probably not. A broad platform is built to serve litigators, researchers and deal lawyers at once, and when your practice is mostly drafting and negotiating agreements, a tool built only for that work will usually fit better and cost less to run.
What all-purpose platforms are built to do
Harvey and Legora are serious products. They cover legal research, large-scale document review, disputes, regulatory work and a long list of practice areas, and they are used by some of the largest firms and legal departments in the world. Legora in particular now markets to small and mid-sized firms and to smaller in-house teams, so this is no longer a question only large firms face.
For a full-service firm with a busy disputes team, that breadth is the point. One platform across every department is simpler to buy, govern and train on. The question is whether the same logic holds for a firm whose fee earners spend their days on share purchase agreements, commercial contracts, leases and the markups that follow.
Who pays for the heavy use
Our view at Scriptum is that broad per-seat legal AI tends to spread its costs unevenly. Litigation and investigations work can involve very large volumes of documents and long research sessions, which means heavy use of the underlying models. Transactional work is different: it is more often about producing a sound first draft, checking it against the firm's positions and responding to a markup. When everyone pays the same seat price, the transactional lawyers are, in effect, helping to subsidise the heaviest users.
That is an argument, not a measured fact, and it will matter more to some firms than others. But it is worth asking any vendor how their pricing reflects the work your lawyers actually do.
If most of your work is contracts, you should be paying for a contracts tool.
What a transactional firm should weigh instead
Three questions tend to separate a good fit from an expensive one.
Where does the work happen? Transactional lawyers draft, comment and track changes in Microsoft Word. A tool that sits inside Word gets used on live matters. One that needs a separate portal often ends up used by a handful of enthusiasts.
What does it draft from? A draft built from generic text still needs to be pulled back into your house style and your standard positions. A draft built from your own precedents starts much closer to something a partner would send.
What does it remember? The reasons behind a negotiated position often live in one associate's head. A tool that captures clause choices and positions as the team works, and keeps them as a record the firm owns, is worth more over time than one that resets at the end of every session.
Where Scriptum fits
Scriptum is built only for transactional work, for firms of twenty to a hundred fee earners. It is a Microsoft Word add-in, it drafts from your firm's own templates and precedents, and the positions your lawyers take are captured into a clause library that belongs to the firm. Pricing is published on our website, starting at £79 per user per month on the Starter plan, so you can put a number in front of the partnership before the first meeting.
None of this makes a broad platform the wrong choice for a full-service firm with a large disputes practice. But if your firm lives in contracts, it is worth seeing what a narrower tool can do on a matter you are already running. Book a demo and we will walk through it with you.