Casetext Shut Down: What Happened and the Best Casetext Replacement

Casetext shut down as a standalone product on April 1, 2025. Thomson Reuters, which owns Westlaw, acquired Casetext for 650 million dollars in a deal that closed in August 2023, ran it for about eighteen months, then retired it and folded its technology into CoCounsel, launching CoCounsel Legal in August 2025. If your login stopped working and nobody sent you a useful explanation, this is what happened and what your actual options are.

The short version is that Casetext did not fail. It was bought by the company it was undercutting, and then it was turned off. That is an unusual thing to say out loud about a product a lot of lawyers genuinely liked, but it is the accurate description of the sequence, and it explains why the replacement costs more than what you had.

What happened to Casetext?

Thomson Reuters announced the acquisition in June 2023 and completed it that August for 650 million dollars in cash. At the time, the pitch was that Casetext's AI work, particularly CoCounsel, would accelerate what Thomson Reuters was building. Casetext staff and co-founders moved into the CoCounsel organization inside Thomson Reuters.

For roughly eighteen months, the standalone Casetext product kept running while the technology was absorbed. Then, on April 1, 2025, Thomson Reuters retired it. It is no longer sold or supported on its own. In August 2025 the company launched CoCounsel Legal, which is the successor built on the same lineage of technology.

Why turn off a product people were paying for? The commercial logic is not mysterious. Casetext was priced as a self-serve subscription that a solo practitioner could buy with a credit card in a few minutes. Westlaw is sold through a sales process at a substantially higher per-seat price. Keeping both alive means the cheaper one competes with the expensive one inside the same company, and the expensive one has much better margins. Absorbing the technology into the premium line and retiring the budget product resolves that conflict in the direction you would expect.

Is Casetext really gone, or did it just get renamed?

Both descriptions are partly right, and the distinction matters when you are shopping.

The technology is not gone. CoCounsel is built on Casetext's work, so calling it a continuation of the product line is fair. If you loved the underlying research and drafting capability, a recognizable descendant of it is still on the market.

The product you actually bought is gone. What made Casetext what it was, for most of the people now searching for a replacement, was not only the software. It was the commercial shape: a published price, a signup form, no sales call, no procurement, no term. That shape did not survive. CoCounsel is sold the way enterprise legal software is sold, and that is the part former subscribers are running into.

How much does the replacement cost?

Thomson Reuters does not publish a flat price for CoCounsel, and this is worth stating precisely because a lot of numbers circulate that are not official. As of July 2026 it sells four named configurations, CoCounsel Legal, Westlaw Advantage with CoCounsel Essentials, Practical Law Dynamic Tool Set with CoCounsel Essentials, and CoCounsel Essentials, and not one of them shows a rate. Our CoCounsel Legal tier and pricing breakdown sets out what each bundle contains and which figures a vendor page will actually confirm.

What the company's own plans page does is ask for your sector, your number of attorneys, your jurisdiction, and your preferred plan duration before it will show you a figure. It offers one, two, and three year subscription terms, describing longer terms as offering greater savings. It states that online pricing is available to new customers only, and that existing customers should contact sales. Firms above roughly ten attorneys are routed to a sales representative rather than the self-serve configurator.

Third-party pricing trackers and resellers publish estimated per-seat figures, and the reported spread is wide, running from around one hundred dollars per user per month for a narrow add-on to several hundred and up for configurations that pair Westlaw Advantage with CoCounsel. Those figures are estimates from analysts and resellers, not rate cards, and CoCounsel is frequently sold attached to a Westlaw subscription rather than freestanding, which is the main reason real invoices land higher than the add-on numbers people quote. Get your own quote in writing, and ask specifically what the configuration costs without a Westlaw subscription attached.

The honest summary: the successor is a more capable, more expensive, more heavily contracted product than the thing you lost. For some firms that is an upgrade worth paying for. For a solo who used Casetext to answer research questions, it is a different category of purchase.

Can I get a refund for my Casetext subscription?

Refund and proration questions go to Thomson Reuters customer support directly, with your account details and subscription dates in hand. Nobody outside Thomson Reuters can process, promise, or predict a Casetext refund, and any third party telling you otherwise is guessing. If you were mid-term when the product was retired, ask specifically about the unused portion of your term, and get whatever you are told in writing. That is the whole of the useful advice anyone can honestly give here.

What is the best Casetext replacement?

The right answer depends entirely on which part of Casetext you actually used, and being specific about that will save you money. Most former subscribers fall into one of three groups.

You used the whole suite

If you relied on document review, deposition prep, drafting, and the citator, and your practice bills enough to fund it, CoCounsel Legal is the direct successor and the path of least resistance. Get a quote, negotiate the term, and confirm in writing whether a Westlaw subscription is bundled in. You are buying a genuinely deep product. You are also buying a procurement process, so plan for it.

You mostly needed to find and cite the on-point case

This is the biggest group, and it is the group that gets oversold. If what you did in Casetext was type a legal question, read the cases it surfaced, and cite the good one, you do not need an enterprise suite to replace that. That is the specific gap Cases fills as a Casetext alternative: ask in plain English, get on-point precedents back as headnote cards with a plain-English summary, the holding, and a real citation you verify, at 29 dollars per month with the price printed on the page and no contract. It is not a suite, it has no citator, and it does not pretend otherwise. Our CoCounsel alternative page lays out that comparison honestly, including where CoCounsel wins.

You are willing to do more of the work yourself

Free sources are real and underused. Google Scholar, CourtListener, and the state judiciary websites publish appellate opinions at no cost, and if you already know the case you want, they will hand it to you in under a minute. Check your bar membership too, because dozens of state and specialty bars include a Fastcase library, now part of vLex under Clio, in your dues. If you already have it, use it before you pay for anything. The consistent limitation across all of these is that none of them ships a citator, so nothing tells you a case has been overruled. See how to find case law for the free landscape, and how to check a case is still good law for the verification step.

What replaced the Casetext citator?

Thomson Reuters points former users toward KeyCite, its own citator, which lives inside the Westlaw and CoCounsel ecosystem rather than being sold separately. There is no free tool that reliably tells you a case has been overruled or superseded, and this is the single most common gap people fall into when they downgrade after a shutdown. Whatever you replace Casetext with, decide deliberately how you are going to run that check. Skipping it is how briefs get withdrawn. Our citator comparison puts KeyCite, Shepard's, BCite and Authority Check side by side with what each one costs, and a case citation checker will at least confirm the citation you are about to file points at a real opinion.

The lesson worth taking from this

A tool your practice depends on can be bought and switched off, and you will get roughly no say in it. The things that reduce the damage are boring and worth doing anyway. Keep your research portable, meaning the citations and the memos live somewhere you control rather than only inside a vendor's interface. Know what your bar association already gives you. And be honest with yourself about which features you actually use, because the moment you have to re-buy them, that list is what you are shopping for, and a vague sense that the old tool was good will get you sold a suite.

The same principle applies past research. Firms that survived the shutdown with the least pain were the ones whose past briefs, memos, and matter files were not trapped in one system, so when the tool changed they could still find any answer across their own files without re-doing work they had already paid for once. Your own prior work product is usually the most valuable research asset in the building, and it is the one nobody licenses to you.

Where this leaves you

Casetext is not coming back, and the successor is a different kind of purchase. If you need the full suite, get the quote and negotiate hard on the term. If you need affordable, self-serve, plain-English case law search, that market did not disappear when Casetext did, and it costs a great deal less than the bundle you are being pointed toward. Whichever you pick, verify every citation at the source before you file it. Courts have sanctioned lawyers over AI-generated cases nobody checked, and no vendor takes that duty off your shoulders. Cases is informational research, not legal advice.