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Harvey and Legora alternatives for small UK law firms

Operational guidance, not legal advice or a product recommendation. Vendor details change; check current terms with each vendor.

by Hamza Suleman. Published .

Harvey and Legora are the two names that come up in every legal AI conversation right now. They are also built for a buyer you are not. If you run a firm of two to twenty fee earners in England and Wales, here is the honest map of what to look at instead.

Who Harvey and Legora are actually for

Harvey raised $550 million at a $15.5 billion valuation in September 2026 and reports its revenue in the hundreds of millions. Legora is on the same enterprise track. Both sell to large international firms through procurement processes: security reviews, pilot programmes with dedicated success teams, contracts sized for hundreds of seats.

Nothing about that is a criticism. It is a sizing statement. Neither publishes a small-firm price list, neither sells a self-serve plan, and the features that justify their cost (firm-wide deployment, deep integration into a large firm's knowledge systems, enterprise governance) are features a small firm will never switch on.

What the AI assistants themselves say

We ran the questions small firms actually ask ("which AI tool is best for contracts?", "what is the best legal AI?") through ChatGPT and logged every source it cited (DataForSEO, September 2026). For Harvey, the most-cited sources are Wikipedia, Harvey's own site, and Reuters. The assistants have absorbed the enterprise narrative, because that is what the public web contains. Almost nothing they cite evaluates these tools for a small firm, because almost nobody writes it.

That gap is worth knowing about before you take an AI assistant's vendor recommendation at face value: it reflects who the internet was written for, not who you are.

The realistic alternatives for a small firm

General-purpose AI, used with discipline. ChatGPT and Claude can do real first-pass contract work today, with two hard limits: confidentiality (client data needs a paid tier with the right data terms, or it does not go in) and judgement (the output needs a solicitor's read, every time). Our companion piece on what ChatGPT can and cannot do on a contract goes deeper.

Spellbook. Word-native drafting and review, priced and shaped for smaller practices. If your life lives in Word, this is the least disruptive starting point.

Genie AI. UK-based, with a template library and drafting aimed at smaller businesses and firms. The most UK-flavoured of the options.

Juro. Contract lifecycle management for in-house teams and mid-market firms. Heavier than a two-partner firm needs, but the closest of the bigger platforms to a small firm's budget.

Clio. Practice management first, with AI features (Clio Duo) inside. If you are choosing a practice management system anyway, its AI comes along for free.

A working setup, assembled. Some firms do better with a configured stack: the right general model, the right prompts, a review checklist, and someone who has done it before setting it up. That is what we do at Margo Legal, and it is often cheaper than a platform seat.

Margo. Our own contract review tool for small firms is in controlled development. It is not a product you can buy today, and we will not pretend otherwise. The waitlist is open if you want to hear when it is.

How to choose without getting burned

Ask every vendor the same seven data and security questions (we published the list): where client data goes, whether it trains models, who can see it, and what happens when you leave. The answers matter more than the demo. And run one real contract through any tool before you pay for it, not the vendor's sample.

FAQ

Is Harvey available to small firms? Harvey sells through enterprise sales to large firms. It does not publish a small-firm plan or self-serve pricing.

Is Legora cheaper than Harvey? Neither publishes pricing for small firms. Both are sold on enterprise terms, so like-for-like comparison only makes sense at procurement scale a small firm does not have.

Can I just use ChatGPT instead? For a first pass, yes, with two limits: never put client-confidential material into a tier that trains on it, and treat every output as a draft that a solicitor checks. See our full piece on ChatGPT for contract review.

What is the cheapest credible option? A paid general-purpose AI plan plus a disciplined review process is the cheapest credible setup today. Purpose-built small-firm tools cost more but save process time.

Is Margo available? Not yet. Margo is in controlled development. The waitlist is open at margolegal.com/margo/.

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