Comparison · Commercial model

Buying a tool, or renting access to one.

The monthly figure is the smaller half of the question. The larger half is what happens when the vendor's pricing or product direction changes.

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What the commercial model decides

Four things, only one of which appears on the invoice.

Total cost over three years

Per-seat monthly across the firm, multiplied by thirty-six, against software plus one workstation. Include review time on both sides — most comparisons omit it.

Pricing risk

Legal AI pricing has been moving from flat rate toward usage-based. A one-time purchase has already removed that exposure.

Continuity

A subscription ends when it ends — at renewal, on a pricing change, or if the vendor is acquired and the product is retired. Owned software keeps running.

Rationing

Metered tools get rationed by the people using them, which quietly destroys the value. Nothing here counts anything.

What stays true on every matter

These do not change by practice area, firm size, or the question asked.

Nothing leaves the firmNo cloud, no API call, no telemetry. The matter is read on hardware the firm owns.

Owned, not subscribedA one-time purchase. No per-seat monthly fee and no usage meter.

Citations verified on-machineAuthority is checked against a local corpus, not recalled from a model’s memory.

The entire matterFull workup across the whole file — not a chat window over one document.

Runs on your workstationA current RTX-class GPU. Designed to run with no internet connection at all.

Bring your current invoice.

We will model it against ownership in front of you, including the review time and the hardware. If subscription wins for your firm we will say so.

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Questions firms ask

The answers below are specific to this page’s subject.

Is ownership always cheaper?

No. For a very small firm using a tool lightly, a cheap subscription can be less over three years. It depends on headcount, usage and how long you keep the hardware.

What about being stuck on old software?

Updates are available and delivered deliberately. The difference is that not taking one does not stop the software working.

How do we depreciate it?

A one-time software purchase plus hardware is generally a capital item rather than an operating expense. Your accountant will have a view, and it is often a favourable one.

What if HIGHCOURT stops trading?

The software is installed on your machine and continues to run. That is the substantive difference from a hosted service, which stops the day the service does.

Other pages covering the same ground from a different angle.

Owned (not subscribed) legal AI One-time purchase legal AI (no monthly fees) On-premise vs cloud legal AI Offline legal AI for solo practitioners Private AI for small law firms HIGHCOURT vs CoCounsel / Casetext

See it run on a real matter.

A briefing walks the whole path — intake, workup, the Adjudicator's pass, and the work product that comes out the other side.