Best Casetext Replacement in 2026: What Former Subscribers Switched To

There is no single best Casetext replacement, because Casetext was three products wearing one login: a free case law archive, a brief-analysis tool called CARA, and a citator called SmartCite. Work out which of the three you actually opened every week and the decision takes about five minutes. CoCounsel Legal is the direct descendant and costs several times more. Your bar association's Fastcase benefit covers the archive for nothing. And if what you miss is cheap plain-English search that hands you a citation, that gap is the one most of the market left open.

Thomson Reuters shut Casetext down on 1 April 2025, less than two years after buying it for 650 million dollars. Checked on 19 August 2026, casetext.com now returns HTTP 410 Gone on every URL, which is the status code that tells search engines a page is permanently removed rather than temporarily missing. We documented the full picture, including the farewell message the dead pages still serve, on our Casetext page.

This article is about what to do next. It is informational research guidance, not legal advice, and every price in it is labeled as either published by the vendor or reported by buyers. The two never get merged.

What is the best Casetext replacement?

The best replacement is the one that covers the specific thing you lost. Most former subscribers used one part of Casetext heavily and assumed they needed all of it. If you mainly read cases, a free archive covers you. If you ran briefs through CARA, only CoCounsel Legal does that job properly, at a quote-only price. If you relied on SmartCite, you need a real citator and no cheap tool has one. Here is the honest map.

Read that table and one thing stands out. Casetext sold at roughly 65 to 100 dollars a seat with the number on its own website, and almost nothing in this market now sits in that band with a published price. The successor moved up, and the cheap options moved down. The middle emptied out.

CoCounsel Legal: the direct descendant

CoCounsel Legal is Casetext's technology, built by the same team, relaunched by Thomson Reuters in August 2025 inside the Westlaw product line. If CARA was the reason you paid for Casetext, this is the only real answer, and it is a better product than CARA was, because it now sits on top of Westlaw's editorial layer, the Key Number System and KeyCite.

The catch is commercial rather than technical. Casetext was self-serve: a credit card and you were working that afternoon. CoCounsel Legal is quote-only, and checked on 19 August 2026 the pricing path on its own product page returns a 404. There is one useful anchor, though, and it is the most practical number in this whole market. CoCounsel Legal contains full Westlaw Advantage, and Advantage sold on its own publishes 256.75 dollars per user per month for a single circuit and 399.75 for all states plus federal, for firms of ten attorneys or fewer. Work upward from there and the first quote will not shock you. Reported small-firm CoCounsel figures start around 225 per user per month and climb with the bundle, but treat those as buyer estimates rather than a rate card.

Worth knowing before the sales call: there is no self-serve trial and no published tier list, so scope the seats and the jurisdictions you actually need before you dial. We go through the whole quote in how much does CoCounsel cost and compare the configurations in CoCounsel vs Westlaw.

Is there a free Casetext alternative?

Yes, for reading cases, and most lawyers already have one they are not using. Your bar association's Fastcase benefit covers federal and state cases, statutes, regulations and court rules, plus the Cert Citator, and it is included in dues you already pay. Fastcase states it partners with more than eighty national, state and county bars. For a solo who mainly needs to open opinions, that is the answer, and it costs nothing.

Two practical notes. Sign in through your own bar's member portal rather than at the vendor site, because the bar provisions and authenticates the access, and getting this wrong is the single most common reason a perfectly valid account appears broken. And the benefit is the library, not the assistant: Vincent AI is usually offered to members at a discount rather than bundled. The details are on our Fastcase page and in what your vLex Fastcase bar benefit includes.

Outside the bar route, CourtListener and govinfo hold federal opinions free, and RECAP adds docket material. PACER charges 10 cents a page capped at 3 dollars per document, waives fees at or below 30 dollars a quarter, and written opinions are always free. These are archives rather than research tools: no plain-English search, no negative-treatment flags, and thin coverage of state trial courts. They replace the reading, not the researching.

What replaced SmartCite?

Nothing cheap, and this is where honest advice matters more than a recommendation. SmartCite told you whether a case had been treated badly by later courts, it shut down with everything else on 1 April 2025, and there was no export path out of it. The real citators are KeyCite in Westlaw, Shepard's in LexisNexis, BCite in Bloomberg Law and Cert Citator in the Fastcase bar benefit. Every one of them arrives attached to a subscription.

We do not have a citator, we say so on every page of this site, and no amount of good search substitutes for a negative-treatment flag. Do not let any vendor, us included, blur that line. It is also worth knowing how good the good ones actually are: Paul Hellyer's study in Law Library Journal volume 110 reviewed 357 citing relationships and found Shepard's and KeyCite each missed or mislabeled roughly a third of negative citing relationships, and BCite more than two thirds. A citator is a strong first pass, not a verdict. We work through the practical routine in how to Shepardize a case and compare the two market leaders in KeyCite vs Shepard's.

What about the tools that publish a price?

Three do, and in a market this quote-heavy that is worth something on its own. Checked on 19 August 2026:

• midpage publishes Starter at 30 dollars a month and Pro at 80 dollars a month billed annually, with a two-week trial and a Legal Engineer tier priced on request. Closest in spirit to what Casetext charged.
• Paxton AI publishes 499 dollars per user per month or 2,999 per user per year, with a 7-day trial, and lists SOC 2, ISO 27001 and HIPAA certifications. A different budget entirely, aimed at firms that need the compliance paperwork.
• Cases publishes 29 dollars per user per month. Ask a question the way you would say it out loud, get on-point federal and state precedents with the holding and a citation you can open. No citator, no quote, no multi-year term.

Bloomberg Law and vLex Vincent are both credible and neither publishes a rate. Bloomberg Law does offer the longest published trial in the market at 14 days with no card, which is enough time to test it on real matters. If a vendor will not tell you the price before a call, that is information too. We lay the whole market out side by side in our legal research pricing comparison.

Can I get a refund for my Casetext subscription?

Start with Thomson Reuters support, because Casetext no longer has a support desk of its own and there is no working sign-in on the domain. casetext.com and casetext.com/login both return HTTP 403 behind a bot challenge page, so there is no account portal left to log into and no self-service billing history to pull. Thomson Reuters published no blanket refund policy for the shutdown; handling was per account, and former subscribers describe outcomes ranging from prorated credit to a migration offer onto CoCounsel.

If you are chasing this now, more than a year after the closure, have your original invoice or card statement ready, because you cannot retrieve it from the vendor. That is a good argument for keeping billing records outside any vendor portal, whoever the vendor is.

The thing to check before you sign anything

Every Casetext case law link ever published now returns 410 Gone. Not a redirect to an equivalent page somewhere else. Gone. That means the citations you pasted into briefs, internal memos, client emails and CLE handouts are dead, and so is every Casetext link in every law school research guide and blog post on the internet.

Before you migrate anything, run a search across your own work product for casetext.com and re-check each hit against a source you can still open. This matters more than it sounds. A citation that resolves to a dead page is not verified, it is unverifiable, and a brief full of unverifiable citations reads exactly like a brief full of fabricated ones. Damien Charlotin's AI Hallucination Cases database, which counts only decisions where a court explicitly found or clearly implied reliance on hallucinated material, listed 1,934 cases at its 19 August 2026 update, against 719 in January 2026. Courts have not sanctioned anyone for using AI. They have sanctioned filings nobody read.

There is a second, duller task hiding in the switch, and firms miss it every time. Most engagement letters describe how research charges are billed back to the client, and many name the platform outright. If you move from a 65 dollar seat to a quoted subscription, or from a billed-back charge to a flat monthly one, that clause needs updating and the client needs to agree to it. Redraft it once, then send it out for signature alongside the next matter update rather than letting it drift to the bottom of the list. Sorting it before the first invoice under the new arrangement is much easier than explaining it afterward.

How to decide, in five minutes

Open your calendar for the last month and count. How many times did you upload a brief for analysis? How many times did you check whether a case was still good law? How many times did you just need to find and read an opinion? Whichever number is highest is the product you are actually buying, and the other two are features you can source separately or do without.

For most solos and small firms the honest answer comes out the same way: switch on the bar benefit you already pay for, add a cheap search tool that understands a sentence, and buy a full platform only when a specific matter genuinely requires the editorial layer. That combination costs a fraction of a CoCounsel seat and covers the great majority of the work. If it turns out you are the exception and CARA was the whole point, budget for the quote and go in knowing the Advantage floor underneath it.

If you want a step-by-step version of the move, including what to export and in what order, we wrote one in how to switch from Casetext. The background on the shutdown itself is in Casetext shut down: what it means for your firm, and if you want to see how we compare against what you had, that is on the Casetext alternative page.

Whatever you land on, keep the habit Casetext users already had: open the case and read the passage you are relying on. That was good practice when the tool was cheap and it is the only thing that has not changed.