Business
The real cost of legal AI — and how to model it
2026-10-24
Short answer
The visible cost of legal AI is the subscription; the real cost is the time to verify what it produces. Model it honestly: licence fee per seat, plus the minutes of lawyer time spent checking each output, multiplied by volume. A tool that saves ten minutes of drafting but adds eight minutes of checking saves almost nothing. The tools that pay are the ones that reduce total time to a defensible document, not just time to a first draft.
The honest equation
| Line | What to count |
|---|---|
| Licence | Per seat, per month |
| Verification | Lawyer minutes × volume |
| Rework | Time lost to a wrong output |
| Net | Time to a defensible document |
Why verification dominates
A first draft is cheap to generate and expensive to trust. Unless the tool grounds its output in sources, the checking time can exceed the drafting time it saved.