Harvey AI vs CoCounsel: Pricing, Free Trial and Which Legal AI to Buy

Neither Harvey nor CoCounsel publishes a price. We requested both vendor pricing URLs on 20 August 2026: harvey.ai/pricing redirects to www.harvey.ai/pricing and returns HTTP 404, and Thomson Reuters serves a 404 at the CoCounsel Legal pricing path while routing buyers into a quote configurator instead. Every per-seat figure you have read for either product is a third-party report, and the reports disagree with each other by more than four times. That is the single most useful thing to know before you take either sales call.

The comparison people actually want is not which model is smarter. It is which of these two you can afford, what you are locked into, and whether the thing will cite a case that does not exist. This piece answers those in order, using what the vendors publish rather than what the roundups repeat. It is informational research guidance, not legal advice.

Harvey AI vs CoCounsel at a glance

Read the last row as a warning rather than as data. Those are figures other people have published, not figures either vendor stands behind, and we flag them as reported throughout for that reason.

How much does Harvey AI cost?

Harvey does not say, and it has not said for as long as we have been checking. As of 20 August 2026, harvey.ai/pricing issues an HTTP 308 to www.harvey.ai/pricing, which returns 404. There is no price page, no plan table, no seat calculator and no self-serve signup. Buying starts with a conversation.

The reported numbers are worth looking at only because of how far apart they are. Published third-party estimates in 2026 range from about 500 dollars per user per month at the low end to 1,500 or 2,000 dollars and above for large firms, with one commonly cited analysis putting a median annual contract near 175,000 dollars and seat minimums in the 25 to 50 range on twelve month terms. A four-fold spread is not a market rate. It is what happens when everybody is quoting somebody else's negotiated deal.

The practical consequence for a buyer is that you have no anchor. When a vendor publishes a rate, you can hold it to that rate. When it does not, the first number you hear is set by what the seller thinks you will pay, which is why firm size and attorney count come up so early in these calls. We wrote up the full evidence trail in how much Harvey AI costs.

How much does CoCounsel cost?

Also unpublished, but the structure around it changed recently and the change is informative. Thomson Reuters now routes buyers through a plans and pricing configurator segmented by law firm, corporation and government, with separate paths for CoCounsel Essentials and for CoCounsel Legal at what the URLs label 300, 500 and 700. Checked on 20 August 2026, those pages return HTTP 200 and render no dollar figure in the page source.

Two things on that configurator are genuinely published and worth writing down, because we have not seen them quoted anywhere. First, online pricing is available only to new customers at law firms with up to ten attorneys. Everyone else is routed to a sales representative. Second, Thomson Reuters publishes its multi-year discounts openly: 12 percent off a two year subscription and 18 percent off a three year subscription. That is a real, checkable number you can use, and it tells you the term length is the lever the seller expects to pull.

There is also a floor worth knowing. CoCounsel Legal contains the Westlaw Advantage research layer, and when we last verified Advantage sold on its own, on 14 August 2026, it published 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 and new customers only. Today that figure sits behind the configurator rather than on an open page, so treat it as a floor established at our last check rather than a rate you can quote back today. Reported small-firm CoCounsel figures start around 225 dollars per user per month and climb with the bundle. Our tier-by-tier breakdown is in how much CoCounsel costs.

Does Harvey AI have a free trial or a free version?

No to both. Harvey publishes no trial length, no free tier and no self-serve entry point, which makes it unusual even in a quote-only market. CoCounsel Legal offers a "Request free trial" form but states no term on it. For comparison, Bloomberg Law publishes 14 days, Westlaw Edge and Advantage publish 7 days with no credit card, Paxton AI publishes 7 days, midpage publishes two weeks, and Lexis+ with Protege publishes 2 days, which is the shortest published trial in the market.

Trial length is the closest thing this market has to an apples-to-apples number, precisely because so little else is published. A vendor that will not tell you how long you get to test the product before signing a multi-year term is telling you something about how it expects the sale to go.

Does Harvey AI use Claude or OpenAI?

Harvey does not name its foundation models publicly, and neither does Thomson Reuters for CoCounsel. That matters more than it sounds, because it is a question your own clients may eventually ask you. If a client's outside counsel guidelines restrict which AI providers may process their material, "the vendor declines to say" is a difficult answer to send back.

The contrast worth noting is that a competitor does disclose. LexisNexis states that Protege General AI draws on OpenAI, Google and Anthropic models by name. Whatever you think of that product, naming the providers is the more useful behavior for a firm running a vendor review, and it is reasonable to ask both Harvey and Thomson Reuters for the same disclosure in writing during procurement. Model disclosure sits alongside the rest of the security review, where the firms that run a serious one usually already have a process for mapping a vendor's controls to SOC 2 and ISO 27001 rather than accepting a logo on a slide. For reference, Paxton AI publishes SOC 2, ISO 27001 and HIPAA compliance directly on its pricing page.

Does Harvey AI hallucinate?

Every generative legal tool can, including both of these and including ours. The relevant question is what sits between the model and your brief. CoCounsel's structural answer is that its research runs against Westlaw content with KeyCite attached, so a citation it surfaces exists in a database and carries a treatment flag. Harvey is not a case law database vendor, so grounding depends on what you connect it to and how the workflow is configured.

The scale of the underlying problem is now measurable. Damien Charlotin's AI Hallucination Cases database, read on 20 August 2026, records 1,935 court decisions worldwide where a judge found or clearly implied that a filing relied on hallucinated material, up from roughly 200 in mid-2025. The inclusion bar is strict, so the real number of fake citations that never reached a written decision is larger.

What the sanctions decisions actually punish is worth understanding before you buy anything. In the six US federal generative AI sanctions decisions from February to April 2026 collected by Norton Rose Fulbright, no court sanctioned anyone for using AI. They sanctioned filings nobody checked. The variable separating a public reprimand from a five-figure penalty was what counsel did after the problem surfaced. In Whiting v. City of Athens, Tennessee, decided by the Sixth Circuit on 13 March 2026 at 170 F.4th 455, a filing with over two dozen fabricated citations drew fees, double costs and 15,000 dollars in punitive sanctions each under Rule 38. No subscription price protects you from that. A verification habit does.

What is the difference between CoCounsel and CoCounsel Legal?

CoCounsel started life at Casetext in 2023 as an AI legal assistant built on GPT-4, and it was the reason Thomson Reuters paid 650 million dollars for that company in a deal that closed in August 2023. Casetext itself was shut down on 1 April 2025, and casetext.com now returns HTTP 410 Gone on every URL we have tested, including robots.txt and paths that never existed. CoCounsel Legal is the relaunch, shipped in August 2025 inside the Westlaw product line.

So the older name describes Casetext's standalone assistant, and the current name describes a Thomson Reuters product sold inside the Westlaw ecosystem. If you are reading a comparison written before April 2025 that discusses Casetext pricing in the present tense, everything after that sentence is stale. The full status trail is on our Casetext page, and the successor product is covered on our CoCounsel Legal page.

Is Harvey AI worth it?

For a large firm or a corporate legal department with a real budget and a genuine volume of drafting, diligence and review work, plausibly yes, and firms are buying it. Harvey is built for that shape of buyer: one platform across many workflows, firm-specific configuration, and an enterprise implementation behind it.

For a solo, a small firm or anyone whose weekly problem is finding the case that answers a question, it is the wrong category of purchase. At any of the reported figures, a single Harvey seat costs more per month than most small firms spend on research in a year. The honest framing is that Harvey and CoCounsel are competing for the same enterprise budget line, and if you are not the buyer that line belongs to, the comparison is academic.

Which one should you buy?

• You already pay for Westlaw. CoCounsel Legal is the path of least resistance, because the research layer and KeyCite are already in your stack and the AI sits on top of content you are licensed for. Ask for the multi-year discount in writing.
• You are a large firm doing volume drafting and diligence. Run both through a real trial on your own matters. This is the comparison Harvey was built to win, and many firms end up running Harvey for production work and a Westlaw-grounded tool for verification.
• You are in-house with a defined workflow. Scope the workflow first, then let it pick the vendor. Both will sell you a platform when you may need one job done.
• You are a solo or small firm. Neither. Start with the research library your bar association already funds, add a published-price search tool, and keep your verification step. The legal research platforms comparison shows which vendors publish a rate at all.

Where we fit, and where we do not

Cases does one of the jobs on this page. You ask a legal question in plain English, you get on-point precedents back with a plain-English summary, the holding, and a citation you can open and check, for 29 dollars per user per month with the price on the page and no term commitment. That is the find-the-case half.

We do not draft, we do not run diligence, we do not review your document set, and we do not have a citator, so we cannot tell you whether a case is still good law. Neither Harvey nor CoCounsel is competing with us on price, and we are not competing with them on scope. If your problem is that research is quoted at four figures a seat and you only ever needed the search, the full feature list sets out exactly where our line is drawn, and the legal research pricing page puts every published rate in this market side by side.

Whatever you buy, check the citation before it goes in the brief. That is the part no vendor on this page has solved.