Casetext Alternative: The Casetext Replacement to Use Now That It Has Shut Down
Casetext is gone. Thomson Reuters retired the standalone product on April 1, 2025, and the technology now lives inside its higher-priced CoCounsel and Westlaw line. If you are here because your Casetext login stopped working, this page is the honest version of what happened and what to do next.
How courts have ruled
Sample results, illustrative only. Informational research, not legal advice. Verify every citation.
In short
Casetext shut down as a standalone product on April 1, 2025. Thomson Reuters, which owns Westlaw, bought Casetext for 650 million dollars in a deal that closed in August 2023, then retired the product and folded its technology into CoCounsel, launching CoCounsel Legal in August 2025. The practical problem for former Casetext subscribers is price: Casetext was a self-serve tool a solo could buy with a credit card, while Thomson Reuters publishes no fixed price list for CoCounsel and instead routes firms through a configurator or a sales rep on one to three year terms. Cases is built for the people that change priced out. You ask in plain English, you get on-point precedents as headnote cards with a summary, the holding, and a real citation you verify, and you pay a published rate starting at 29 dollars per month with no sales call and no lock-in. Cases is informational research, not legal advice, so you confirm every citation in the official reporter before you rely on it.
Last updated July 2026
Side by side
Cases vs Casetext
| Capability | Cases | Casetext |
|---|---|---|
| Still sold as a standalone product | Retired April 1, 2025 | |
| Price published on the website | Successor is quote or configurator based | |
| Starts at 29 dollars per month | ||
| Self-serve signup, no sales call | Successor: configurator or sales rep | |
| Plain-English search, no boolean required | ||
| On-point precedents with summaries and holdings | ||
| Real, checkable citations | ||
| No multi-year contract | Successor: one to three year terms | |
| Full citator and drafting suite |
Comparison reflects general product positioning and is provided in good faith. Verify current capabilities and pricing with each vendor.
Honest read
Where Casetext fits, and where Cases does
Casetext earned its following honestly. It was the tool that proved legal research did not have to mean a boolean query, a sales call, and a multi-year contract, and a solo or a two-person firm could subscribe on a Tuesday afternoon without talking to anyone. That is precisely the thing that disappeared. Thomson Reuters acquired Casetext in August 2023 for 650 million dollars, kept it running for about eighteen months, and shut the standalone product down on April 1, 2025. The AI work did not vanish, it moved: CoCounsel is built on Casetext technology, and Thomson Reuters launched CoCounsel Legal in August 2025 as the place that work now lives.
The reason former Casetext users end up shopping rather than upgrading is the pricing model, not the software. Thomson Reuters does not publish a fixed price list for CoCounsel. Its own plans page asks for your sector, attorney count, jurisdiction, and preferred term length before it will show a number, notes that online pricing is available to new customers only, and offers one, two, and three year subscriptions. Firms above roughly ten attorneys are quoted by a sales representative. Third-party pricing trackers report figures ranging from about one hundred dollars to well over six hundred dollars per month depending on the bundle, but those are estimates from resellers and analysts rather than published rates, so treat any specific number you read online, including here, as something to confirm in writing before you sign.
Cases does not try to be what CoCounsel is. CoCounsel sits inside a large research and drafting suite with a citator, briefs, transactional tooling, and the full Westlaw content library behind it, and for a firm that needs all of that and can fund it, that bundle is a real product with real strengths. Cases is narrower on purpose. It does the part of the job that used to be the reason people loved Casetext: ask a question the way you would say it to a colleague, get back the on-point cases with the holding surfaced on the card, and get a citation you check yourself. If you need a full citator report and an integrated drafting suite, buy the suite. If what you lost on April 1, 2025 was affordable, self-serve, plain-English case search, that is the gap this fills.
One honest caution that applies to every tool in this category, including this one. AI legal research is only as good as your verification habit, and courts have sanctioned lawyers for filing briefs containing cases that an AI tool produced and nobody checked. Cases shows you a real citation for every result specifically so you can confirm it in the official reporter, and that step is not optional. Read our note on where AI research goes wrong before you rely on any of these tools in a filing.
Questions buyers ask
Casetext alternatives, answered
Does Casetext still exist?
No. Casetext was retired as a standalone product on April 1, 2025 and is no longer sold, supported or accessible with a Casetext login. The company itself was acquired by Thomson Reuters in a 650 million dollar deal that closed in August 2023, and the technology now lives inside CoCounsel rather than under the Casetext name. If you are trying to log in and cannot, that is why, and there is no Casetext account to recover.
Why is Casetext no longer available?
Thomson Reuters bought Casetext for 650 million dollars in August 2023 and chose to fold it into its own product line rather than run it alongside Westlaw. Casetext was shut down on April 1, 2025 and its AI technology was absorbed into CoCounsel, with CoCounsel Legal launching in August 2025 as the successor. The commercial logic is straightforward: Casetext sold self-serve seats cheaply to solos, which competed with the way Thomson Reuters prices Westlaw.
Is Casetext free?
It is not available at any price, free or paid, because the product no longer exists. While it ran, Casetext was a paid subscription commonly sold at roughly 65 to 100 dollars per seat per month, which was a large part of its appeal to solo attorneys. Its successor CoCounsel publishes no fixed rate and routes buyers through a configurator or a sales representative, so the self-serve price point that made Casetext popular did not survive the transition.
What was Casetext used for?
Case law research in plain English, brief analysis through its CARA and Compose tools, and citation checking through SmartCite. Its distinguishing feature was that a solo or small firm could subscribe directly with a credit card and search without writing boolean queries, at a time when the incumbents required a sales call and a multi-year contract. That combination of self-serve pricing and plain-English search is the specific thing former users are usually trying to replace.
Is Casetext shutting down?
It already has. Thomson Reuters retired Casetext as a standalone product on April 1, 2025, roughly eighteen months after completing its 650 million dollar acquisition in August 2023. The product is no longer sold or supported on its own. Its technology continues inside Thomson Reuters CoCounsel, and CoCounsel Legal launched in August 2025 as the successor offering.
What happened to Casetext?
Thomson Reuters, the owner of Westlaw, announced its acquisition of Casetext in June 2023 and closed the 650 million dollar cash deal that August. Rather than run Casetext alongside Westlaw at a fraction of the price, Thomson Reuters absorbed the technology into CoCounsel and shut the standalone product down on April 1, 2025. Casetext co-founders and staff moved into the Thomson Reuters CoCounsel organization.
What is the best Casetext replacement?
It depends on which part of Casetext you actually used. If you need the full suite with a citator and drafting tools, CoCounsel Legal is the direct successor, priced through a configurator or a sales rep. If what you valued was affordable, self-serve, plain-English case search, Cases is built for exactly that at 29 dollars per month with the price on the page. Free options like Google Scholar and CourtListener cover retrieval but include no citator.
What is the best Casetext citator replacement?
SmartCite died with the product, and there is no self-serve successor at the old price. Your realistic options are KeyCite inside Westlaw, Shepard's inside LexisNexis, BCite inside Bloomberg Law, or Authority Check in the vLex and Fastcase libraries, which is the cheap route because more than 60 US bar associations include that library in dues. Check your bar portal before you buy anything. Worth knowing that no citator is complete: Paul Hellyer's 2018 study in Law Library Journal reviewed 357 citing relationships and found Shepard's and KeyCite each missed or mislabeled about a third of the negative ones.
How do I move my caselaw history from Casetext?
You cannot migrate it now. Thomson Reuters retired the standalone product on April 1, 2025, and there is no export path or transfer tool into CoCounsel or any third party, so saved searches, folders and annotations that were not exported before shutdown are gone. If you still hold an export, it will be a document set rather than anything a new platform can import natively. The practical move is to treat the research as reference material and rebuild the handful of searches you actually reran, which for most practitioners turns out to be three or four.
Does Casetext search still work?
No. Casetext search, including the parallel search feature it was known for, went offline with the shutdown on April 1, 2025, and casetext.com no longer serves the product. Anyone reaching a Casetext search page today is looking at a redirect or an archived copy. The technology continues inside CoCounsel, but you cannot reach it through the old interface or the old subscription, and there is no free tier of the successor.
Is CoCounsel the same as Casetext?
Not quite. CoCounsel is built on Casetext technology and is owned by the same company, so it is better described as the continuation of that product line than as a separate tool. The differences that matter to a former Casetext subscriber are commercial rather than technical: CoCounsel is sold as part of a larger bundle, has no published flat price, and is generally contracted on one to three year terms rather than bought self-serve.
Can I get a refund for my Casetext subscription?
Refund and proration questions from the shutdown are handled by Thomson Reuters customer support, not by any third party, so contact them directly with your account details and your subscription dates. If you were mid-term when the product was retired, ask specifically about the unused portion of your term and get the answer in writing. Nobody outside Thomson Reuters can process or promise a Casetext refund.
How do I switch from Casetext to another tool?
Work out which half of Casetext you actually used before you shop. If it was SmartCite and good-law checking, you need a citator, and your cheapest route is often a Fastcase or vLex library included in your state bar dues, which carries the Authority Check citator. If it was plain-English case search, a self-serve tool covers it: Cases at a published 29 dollars per month, or midpage at a published 30. Export anything you still need from wherever you stored it, then run three or four of your own real research questions through any candidate before you commit, because relevance on your practice area matters more than a feature list.
Can I move my Casetext research history and saved cases?
Not through any self-serve export we can point you to, because the standalone product was retired on April 1, 2025 and its interface went with it. Anything still recoverable has to come from Thomson Reuters customer support, and whether that is possible depends on your account and how long ago it closed. Contact Thomson Reuters directly and ask specifically about saved research, folders, and citation history rather than the subscription itself. We would rather tell you to ask them than invent a migration path that does not exist.
Is there a Casetext alternative with a free trial?
Several, and trying before you buy matters more here than usual because relevance varies sharply by practice area. midpage states a two-week trial on all plans, Paxton AI states a 7-day trial, and Westlaw offers a trial on its Advantage tier. Check the current terms on each vendor page rather than trusting a roundup, including this one, since trial offers change without notice. Whatever you trial, test it on questions you already know the answer to, so you can judge whether the cases it returns are genuinely on point.
What replaced the Casetext citator?
Thomson Reuters points former Casetext users toward its own citator, KeyCite, which is part of theWestlaw and CoCounsel ecosystem rather than a standalone purchase. There is no free equivalent that reliably tells you a case has been overruled. Cases surfaces a real citation for every result so you can run whatever citator your jurisdiction and budget allow, but it does not itself replace a full citator report.
Other comparisons
Try it on your own question
Transparent self-serve pricing, plain-English search, and a citation you can check for every result. Informational research, not legal advice. Decide for yourself.