The best legal AI tools in 2026: a solicitor's guide
February 3, 2026
Most legal AI is built for the same customer: a large firm with deep pockets, a dedicated IT team, and a practice dominated by M&A and document review at scale.
Most solicitors don't work at that firm.
If you run or work at a boutique — five, ten, twenty people — your reality is different. You're handling employment disputes on Monday, a commercial lease on Tuesday, regulatory compliance on Wednesday. You don't have a team of trainees to delegate to. You don't have an innovation budget. What you have is a caseload that requires you to be sharp across multiple practice areas, and not enough hours to do it all manually.
That's the lens we're using for this guide. Not "which tool has the most features" but "which tool actually helps a small firm with diverse, real-world legal work." We're on this list ourselves — Andri is one of the tools compared below — so take our perspective for what it is. But we'll show our reasoning and you can decide.
What boutique firms actually need
Before the list, the framework. These are the things that matter when you're a small firm choosing AI — informed by what we've learned working with firms like LawBeam (six staff, UK, tech disputes and commercial work) and Blokziel (small Dutch litigation practice, civil and administrative law).
Breadth across practice areas. You're not a contract-review factory. Your AI needs to handle litigation research, regulatory questions, commercial drafting, and procedural compliance — sometimes in the same afternoon. Tools built for one workflow (M&A due diligence, contract management) are solving someone else's problem.
Price per seat. Every pound matters when you're not billing Magic Circle rates. Enterprise pricing that assumes 500+ users is irrelevant. You need something that makes financial sense at five or ten seats.
Memory and context. You're juggling dozens of matters. The tool needs to remember what's been discussed on each one, not start from zero every session. When Blokziel piloted AI, this was their single biggest ask — stop making me re-explain the case.
Court forms and procedure. Blokziel's team was spending 30-40 minutes per court form copying information from multiple sources. That's not a large-firm problem — large firms have paralegals for that. For a small firm, procedural grunt work eats directly into fee-earning time.
Source verification. Under SRA regulations, you're fully responsible for your advice regardless of whether AI helped produce it. You need tools that show exactly where conclusions come from — not confident-sounding errors with citations that don't exist.
Personal support. You don't have an IT department. When something breaks or you need training, you need to talk to someone. As LawBeam's Roshi Sharma puts it: "You can't just call Google."
Speed of onboarding. No six-month enterprise deployment. You need to be productive in days, not quarters.
The tools
Andri
Full disclosure: this is us.
Andri is an agentic legal AI platform operating across the UK and Netherlands. We deploy ten different models — each optimised for specific tasks — rather than running everything through a single LLM. The platform combines legal research, document analysis, email integration, a firm knowledge library, and case simulation in one environment.
What makes it agentic is the ability to execute multi-step legal tasks from a single instruction. Upload a set of contracts and ask for a risk report against your standard terms — the system plans the work, retrieves your standards, compares systematically, and delivers a structured output. Not five prompts. One task. The Advocatenblad test panel (twelve practising lawyers) compared it to a Rolls-Royce: "incredibly well-built, with every possible option."
In practice, LawBeam condensed a hundred hours of transcript review into ten minutes for a product quality dispute. Blokziel reports eight hours saved per week, mostly on court forms and research verification. The platform connects directly to UK government systems, court forms and CPR procedures.
Boutique fit: Strong. Built for diverse practice areas, not a single workflow. Memory across matters. Direct court form support. Personal training sessions. The honest limitation: pricing starts at a premium level (from ~£300/month) that requires commitment, and the breadth of features means there's a genuine learning curve in the first weeks.
Harvey
Harvey is the most well-funded legal AI globally, backed by OpenAI with over $100 million raised. Major firms including Ashurst, Allen & Overy and CMS have adopted it. Harvey excels at document review and analysis at scale — it recently supported Norton Rose Fulbright's work on the UK government's COVID-19 inquiry, processing thousands of documents.
Harvey's strength is large-scale, document-heavy workflows. Pre-built and custom workflows for due diligence, document review, and knowledge management across large teams.
Boutique fit: Limited. Harvey is built for enterprise. The pricing model, implementation requirements, and core use cases assume large teams with high document volumes. If you're a ten-person firm handling diverse litigation and commercial work, Harvey is solving a different firm's problems at a different firm's price point. That's not a knock on the product — it's genuinely good at what it does. It's just not built for you.
Luminance
Cambridge-based Luminance has raised over $165 million and focuses on contract intelligence — analysing, negotiating and managing contracts using AI trained on over 150 million legal documents across 80+ languages. The autopilot feature reviews contracts and generates redlines autonomously.
Luminance is particularly strong for M&A due diligence and large-scale contract portfolio management. If your firm handles significant transactional volume, it's one of the more genuinely agentic tools in the contract space.
Boutique fit: Narrow. If your boutique has a heavy transactional practice — lots of contract review, M&A work, portfolio management — Luminance is worth evaluating seriously. But if your practice is mixed litigation and advisory work (which describes most small firms), the contract-centric focus means you're paying for a specialist tool that covers only part of your work. Implementation requirements also lean enterprise.
Lexis+ AI (LexisNexis)
Lexis+ AI brings LexisNexis's vast legal database into a conversational interface. For UK solicitors, that means answers grounded in Halsbury's Laws, All England Law Reports and Practical Guidance — the most authoritative UK sources available.
The tool excels at legal research. Ask a complex question, get an answer with verifiable citations from sources you trust. The citation quality is a genuine advantage over tools that may hallucinate references. As a generation 2 tool, it's reactive — it answers questions rather than executing workflows — but for pure research, the source quality is hard to beat.
Boutique fit: Good for research, but that's all it does. If your primary bottleneck is finding and verifying case law, Lexis+ AI is solid. But it won't help with document analysis, court form filling, case simulation, or any multi-step workflow. You'll likely need it alongside something else, which means two subscriptions for a small firm.
Legora
Swedish-built Legora has gained serious traction in the UK, with Linklaters rolling it out across 30 offices and Deloitte Legal adopting it firm-wide. ISO 42001 certified for AI governance and ISO 27001 for information security.
Legora adapts to your firm's ways of working — learning from your documents, style and preferences. The collaborative features let teams share AI-assisted research and build on each other's work. Supports review, research and drafting.
Boutique fit: Promising but unproven at the small firm level. The enterprise traction (Linklaters, Deloitte) suggests the product may be oriented toward larger deployments. The collaborative features are valuable if your team is big enough to collaborate meaningfully through the tool. Worth investigating, but verify that the pricing and onboarding work for a smaller team.
Smokeball & Archie AI
Smokeball is a practice management platform with AI integrated throughout. Archie AI, its matter-centric drafting assistant, reads facts, dates and names from your matter file to draft documents automatically — all within the secure practice management environment.
The integration advantage is real: because the AI lives inside your practice management system, it has context that standalone tools lack. It knows the matter, the parties, the key dates.
Boutique fit: Strong if you're already on Smokeball. The AI is a natural extension of the workflow you're already using. If you're on a different practice management system, the switching cost is the barrier — you're adopting a whole platform, not just an AI tool. For firms evaluating practice management and AI together, it's a compelling combination.
Clio
Clio acquired vLex for approximately $1 billion, combining practice management with one of the world's most comprehensive legal databases. Vincent AI provides legal research capabilities across multiple jurisdictions, integrated with billing, client management, and document handling.
Boutique fit: Strong for solo practitioners and small firms wanting an all-in-one solution. If you need practice management, billing, and legal research in a single platform and don't want to stitch together multiple tools, Clio is the most integrated option. The trade-off is depth — a platform that does everything may not do any one thing as deeply as a specialist tool.
LEAP
LEAP offers three AI tools: Matter AI (matter-centric intelligence), LawY (legal research), and Generator (document drafting). Designed specifically for small to mid-sized firms, with AI integrated into existing LEAP workflows.
Boutique fit: Designed for you. LEAP's entire market is small and mid-sized firms, and the modular AI approach means you can adopt features incrementally rather than overhauling everything at once. The reported 2+ hours daily savings is meaningful at small firm scale. Like Smokeball, the main limitation is platform lock-in — the AI works within LEAP, so you need to be on LEAP.
Spellbook
Spellbook focuses specifically on transactional work — drafting, reviewing and analysing contracts. It integrates directly into Microsoft Word, which reduces friction for solicitors who live in Word documents. Features include clause suggestions, automated redlines, and benchmarking against market standards.
Boutique fit: Good if contracts are a major part of your practice. The Word integration means minimal workflow disruption. But Spellbook doesn't do litigation support, legal research outside contract context, or procedural work. For a mixed practice, it covers one slice of your work.
V7 Go
V7 Go takes a different approach: a no-code platform for building custom AI agents. Legal teams chain together multiple AI tools into workflows — extraction, analysis, comparison — without writing code. Each agent handles a specific step and passes results to the next.
Boutique fit: High ceiling, high floor. If your firm has someone who's technically curious and willing to build custom workflows, V7 Go is remarkably flexible. The transparent audit trail is valuable for compliance. But it requires real setup and configuration — this isn't a tool you install and start using on Monday morning. More suited to firms that want to build something bespoke than firms that need something that works out of the box.
Choosing honestly
There's no single right answer. A three-person employment practice has different needs than a fifteen-person commercial firm. But the framework holds:
If your bottleneck is research quality, Lexis+ AI gives you the best sources. If you want practice management and AI in one place, Clio or Smokeball make sense. If you do heavy contract work, Luminance or Spellbook are purpose-built. If you want AI that works across a diverse practice — litigation, advisory, compliance, procedural — and does multi-step work independently, that's what we built Andri to do.
Start with one process. One task you do repeatedly that takes too long. Test two or three tools from this list on that specific task. The difference will be obvious within an hour.
Read also: what agentic AI actually means — and why most legal tools aren't, why agentic reasoning is the only path to production legal AI, and how our personalisation triangle works.