Harvey vs Legora vs CoCounsel vs Spellbook: Which Legal AI Tool for Which Job

The money says this market has a winner. It doesn't say which tool to buy.

Harvey raised $550 million on 9 September 2026 at a $15.5 billion valuation — its fifth mega-round in under two years, up from $11 billion in March, $8 billion in December 2025, $5 billion in June 2025, and $3 billion in February 2025 (TechCrunch, Reuters). Legora, its closest rival, went from a $550 million Series D to a $5.6 billion valuation in the space of a month this spring, backed in part by Nvidia's NVentures (TechCrunch). That velocity is a signal about investor conviction, not about which tool solves your problem — Harvey and Legora are built for roughly the same buyer, while CoCounsel and Spellbook are built for two different jobs entirely. None of the four publishes a price list; all four gate the number behind a sales call (Spellbook at least offers a 7-day free trial to get a feel for the product first — spellbook.com/pricing).

Here's what actually distinguishes them, and who each one is for.

Harvey and Legora are the same shape of tool — the choice is about your firm, not the feature set

Both are full-practice platforms: research, drafting, contract review, and workflow automation in one system, sold enterprise-wide to law firms and corporate legal departments, not per-document or per-matter. Both carry comparable security postures — Legora publishes ISO 27001, ISO 42001, SOC 2, GDPR, and HIPAA certification on its own site (legora.com) — and both are demo-gated with no public pricing.

The difference that matters is incumbency and geography, not capability nobody has independently benchmarked. Harvey says 80% of Am Law 100 firms use it, alongside five of the Fortune 10, and its customer list leans US and UK Big Law: Latham & Watkins, A&O Shearman, Norton Rose Fulbright (harvey.ai, Harvey funding announcement). Legora is Swedish-founded and still stronger in Europe — Bird & Bird, Cleary Gottlieb, Linklaters — while explicitly pushing into the US as its next front, and claims over 1,000 law firms and in-house teams across 50 markets (TechCrunch). If your firm already has relationships or existing matters running through one ecosystem, that's a stronger reason to pick it than any published capability gap, because there isn't one either vendor will let you see: neither publishes third-party benchmark results against the other. Harvey did publish its own Legal Agent Benchmark alongside a proprietary post-trained model it calls Tenet in September's raise — a first for either company — but a vendor grading its own homework isn't a substitute for independent comparison, and none exists yet.

Practically: if you're a large firm or in-house department that wants one platform across litigation, transactional, and contract work, run both in a pilot rather than picking on reputation. The buying decision here is closer to choosing an ERP than choosing a point tool.

CoCounsel is the only one of the four that's grounded in named primary sources — and the only one sold in slices

Where Harvey and Legora sell one platform, Thomson Reuters sells CoCounsel in four distinct tiers, and the difference is deliberate: CoCounsel Essentials (Word-based document analysis, review, and drafting — the only tier with a free trial), Westlaw Advantage with CoCounsel Essentials (litigation research and case assessment), Practical Law Dynamic Tool Set with CoCounsel Essentials (transactional and advisory work), or the full CoCounsel Legal bundle with everything (legal.thomsonreuters.com/plans). A firm with a pure transactional practice can buy the Practical Law tier and skip paying for litigation tools it will never use — something neither Harvey nor Legora's flat platform pricing allows for.

The other differentiator is what it reasons over. CoCounsel's pitch is that it answers from Westlaw content and Practical Law guidance specifically, with citations linked back to that authority, rather than a general-purpose model with web-scale training data (legal.thomsonreuters.com/cocounsel-legal). If your firm already pays for Westlaw or Practical Law, that grounding is close to free lift on a subscription you're already carrying; if you don't, you're buying into an ecosystem, not just a tool. It's SOC 2 and ISO 42001 certified, same as its two full-platform rivals, and equally opaque on price — "View pricing" routes to a sales portal, not a number.

Spellbook is scoped to one job, and its customer list proves it

Spellbook doesn't do legal research, litigation support, or case management. It's a Word add-in for contract review, redlining, and drafting, plus an "Associate" agent for working through multi-document matters, and that's the whole product (spellbook.com/pricing). Pricing is per seat, custom, but with a 7-day free trial to test it before talking to sales — the only one of the four vendors that lets a buyer touch the product without a demo call first.

The customer list on its own pricing page confirms the positioning: eBay, Crocs, Ancestry, Dropbox, Wealthsimple, Five Guys, Fender — in-house legal teams at consumer and retail companies doing contract-heavy, not litigation-heavy, work — alongside mid-size firms like Baker Donelson, Barnes & Thornburg, and Kennedys. That's a different customer than Harvey's Am Law 100 concentration or Legora's global law-firm base. If your actual pain point is "our lawyers spend hours redlining NDAs and vendor agreements in Word," Spellbook is built for exactly that and nothing more — which is also why it's the cheapest of the four to run at a realistic seat count, since you're not paying for research or litigation infrastructure you won't touch.

The decision, by job

Running a large firm or corporate legal department and want one AI platform across research, drafting, litigation, and contract work: Harvey or Legora. Pick based on your existing footprint — US Big Law incumbency favors Harvey, European reach or an in-progress US expansion favors Legora — and pilot both, since neither has a published, independently verified capability edge over the other.

Already paying for Westlaw or Practical Law, or need output that cites back to named legal authority rather than a general model's training data: CoCounsel, and specifically the narrowest tier that matches your practice — don't buy the full bundle if you only do transactional work.

The job is contract review and redlining in Word, not broad legal research or litigation: Spellbook. It's the only one of the four you can trial without a sales call, and its price reflects that it does one thing.

Three adjacent tools solve different jobs than any of these four and shouldn't be shortlisted against them: Luminance is contract review and compliance workflow outside the Word-add-in model, Darrow tracks litigation exposure for plaintiff-side firms, and EvenUp automates personal-injury casework specifically. None of the four in this comparison do those jobs, and none of those three do general legal research or firm-wide drafting.

What none of them will tell you

Every one of these four is privately held and none publishes a rate card. That's not unusual for enterprise software, but it means the "which is cheapest" question this article's readers actually want answered can't be settled from public sources — you will get a number only after a sales conversation, for all four. What can be settled without one: which job each tool is actually built for, and that's the more useful question anyway, since none of Harvey, Legora, or CoCounsel's list prices would tell you whether the tool fits your practice even if you had them.