How to Switch From Casetext: The 2026 Migration Guide

To switch from Casetext, first work out which half of it you used. If you relied on SmartCite for good-law checks, you need a citator, and the cheapest route is usually the Fastcase or vLex library your state bar already includes in your dues. If you relied on plain-English case search, a self-serve tool covers it: Cases publishes 29 dollars per month and midpage publishes 30. There is no self-serve export of your old Casetext research history, so anything you still need has to come from Thomson Reuters support.

Last updated July 2026. Casetext stopped existing as a standalone product on April 1, 2025. If you are only finding out now because a bookmark stopped working, you are not behind: the shutdown got far less coverage than the acquisition did.

What actually happened to Casetext

Thomson Reuters, which owns Westlaw, announced its acquisition of Casetext in June 2023 and closed the deal that August for 650 million dollars in cash. It ran the product for roughly eighteen months, retired the standalone Casetext service on April 1, 2025, and relaunched the underlying technology as CoCounsel Legal in August 2025.

The part that matters to you is not the technology. It is the commercial model. Casetext was a tool a solo could buy with a credit card on a Tuesday afternoon. CoCounsel is sold through a configurator that asks for your sector, attorney count, jurisdiction, and term length before it shows anything, on one to three year subscriptions, with firms above roughly ten attorneys routed to a sales representative. The capability survived the acquisition. The self-serve price point did not. Our full account of the shutdown is in Casetext shut down: what happened.

SmartCite went with it. That is the loss most people underestimate, because a citator is the piece of a research stack you cannot improvise, and no self-serve product has replaced it at anything like Casetext's old price.

Step 1: separate the two jobs Casetext was doing

Legal research is two jobs that vendors sell as one bundle: finding the on-point authority, and confirming it is still good law. Casetext did both, which is why replacing it feels harder than it should. Once you split them, the shopping list gets much shorter, and you may find you only need to replace one.

Be honest with yourself about the second job. If you file, you need a citator, and no amount of AI-generated confidence substitutes for one. If your work is advisory, in-house, academic, or you are a paralegal pulling authority for someone else to verify, you may genuinely only need the first job.

Step 2: check what your bar association already gives you

Do this before you price a single product, because it is free money a surprising number of lawyers leave on the table. A large number of US state bars include a Fastcase or vLex library in the dues you are already paying. That comes with case law search and the Authority Check citator, which means the harder half of your Casetext replacement may already be covered.

Clio completed its acquisition of vLex in November 2025, and Fastcase and vLex are now the same operation, so the branding you see in your bar portal may have changed even if the benefit has not. Log in and look rather than assuming. We compare the options in the citator comparison.

Step 3: pick a replacement for the search half

Here is the honest state of the market for someone who wants what Casetext was, with prices read from each vendor's own page in July 2026.

Two observations from that table. The first is that the middle rung Casetext occupied, real AI research at a self-serve double-digit price, now has more occupants than it did in 2025, not fewer. The second is that nobody in the affordable tier has a citator, and any vendor implying otherwise is worth a hard question. Our Casetext alternative comparison goes deeper on the fit question.

Can I move my Casetext research history and saved cases?

Not through any self-serve export, because the interface was retired along with the product on April 1, 2025. If you have saved research, folders, or citation history you genuinely need, your only route is Thomson Reuters customer support, and whether anything is recoverable depends on your account and how long ago it closed. Ask specifically about saved research and folders rather than about the subscription. We would rather tell you to ask them than describe a migration path that does not exist.

The practical lesson for whatever you buy next: keep your own copy. Save the citation, the pinpoint, and a PDF of the opinion into your matter file rather than trusting a vendor's folder structure to outlive the vendor. Research you cannot retrieve is research you will pay to redo.

Step 4: run a real trial before you commit

Relevance varies far more by practice area than feature lists suggest, so test rather than read. 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. Confirm current terms on each vendor's page, since trial offers change without notice.

The technique that actually tells you something: run three or four research questions you already know the answer to. A tool that returns the case you were thinking of, on the first screen, with the holding stated correctly, is doing the job. A tool that returns twelve plausible-looking cases and none of the right one is failing in a way a feature comparison will never show you. If your firm routes new software through a purchase order process, start that paperwork during the trial rather than after it, because approval cycles routinely outlast a 7-day window.

Step 5: rebuild your verification habit

This is the step people skip, and it is the one with professional consequences. Courts have sanctioned lawyers repeatedly for filing briefs containing citations that were never checked, and the fact pattern is almost always the same: a generative tool produced something plausible and nobody opened the case. Whatever you switch to, the citation it hands you is a starting point, not an authority.

Build the habit explicitly into your workflow: open the actual opinion, confirm the case says what the summary claims, and run the citation through whatever citator you have access to before it goes in a filing. We cover the failure mode in detail in AI hallucination in legal cases, and the mechanics of good-law checking in how to Shepardize a case.

Do former Casetext users get a Westlaw discount?

Thomson Reuters directed former Casetext subscribers toward its own products, and migration offers have circulated, but no standing public discount program is published that we can point you to. If a rep offers you transition pricing, get the term length, the renewal rate, and the out-of-plan search charge in writing before you agree, because the renewal step-up is where quoted deals get expensive. That advice applies to any vendor here, not just this one.

The short version

Check your bar benefit first, since it may cover the citator half for nothing. Replace the search half with a self-serve tool at a published price if that is what you valued about Casetext. Do not expect to recover your old research history. Trial anything with questions you already know the answer to. And keep verifying every citation yourself, because that responsibility never belonged to the software in the first place.

If plain-English case search is what you are replacing, that is exactly what Cases does: ask a legal question the way you would say it to a colleague, and get on-point US federal and state precedents back as headnote cards with a summary, the holding, and a real citation you verify yourself. It is 29 dollars per month, published on the pricing page, with no sales call. It is informational research, not legal advice, and it is not a citator, which is why this article told you to sort out the citator half first.