Legal research free trial comparison: Westlaw, LexisNexis, Bloomberg Law and Vincent AI trial lengths
Twelve vendors, the trial each one actually publishes, whether a credit card is required, and the contract waiting on the other side. Checked against the vendors' own pages on 1 September 2026, with the rows we could not verify marked as unverified rather than guessed. Below the table there is a five-step plan for spending a seven day trial so it tells you something. If you would rather skip the trial queue entirely, ask a question in the box on the right.
How courts have ruled
Sample results, illustrative only. Informational research, not legal advice. Verify every citation.
In short
Most legal research free trials run seven days. Westlaw Advantage, Westlaw Edge and Practical Law all publish seven days with no credit card required, and Paxton AI publishes seven days as well. midpage is the longest we could verify at two weeks. Bloomberg Law and Trellis were both recorded at 14 days but neither page was readable to us today. vLex offers a Vincent AI trial without publishing its length, Lexis+ with Protégé was recorded at two days, and Harvey, CoCounsel Legal and Lex Machina publish no trial at all. The pattern that matters is the mirror image of the one people look for: the cheapest products give you the longest trials, and the most expensive ones replace the trial with a sales call. Informational research, not legal advice, and always verify the citation.
Last updated September 2026
Twelve vendors, one table
Every legal research free trial we could verify
Each row was checked against the vendor's own page rather than against a directory listing, because directories in this category are frequently years out of date. Where a vendor blocked us, the row says we could not verify it and gives the date of the last reading we trust. We would rather publish a gap than a number we cannot stand behind.
| Vendor | Published trial | Credit card | How you get it | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Westlaw Advantage | 7 days | No credit card needed | Self-serve form | Verified first-hand 1 Sep 2026 |
| Westlaw Edge | 7 days | No credit card needed | Self-serve form | Verified first-hand 1 Sep 2026 |
| Practical Law | 7 days, and at most two trials per year | No credit card needed | Premium tier only | Verified first-hand 29 Aug 2026 |
| midpage | Two weeks | Not stated | Self-serve signup | Verified first-hand 1 Sep 2026 |
| Paxton AI | 7 days | Not stated | Self-serve signup | Verified first-hand 1 Sep 2026 |
| Bloomberg Law | 14 days, no card (previously recorded) | Previously recorded as none | Request form | Could not verify 1 Sep 2026 |
| Trellis | 14 days (previously recorded) | Not published | Self-serve signup | Could not verify 1 Sep 2026 |
| vLex and Vincent AI | Offered, length not published | Not stated | Self-serve form | Verified first-hand 1 Sep 2026 |
| Lexis+ with Protégé | 2 days (recorded 13 Aug 2026) | Not published | Request form | Vendor unreadable |
| Harvey | None published | Not applicable | Sales contact only | Verified 22 Aug 2026 |
| CoCounsel Legal | None published | Not applicable | Sales contact only | Verified 26 Aug 2026 |
| Lex Machina | None published | Not applicable | Sales contact only | Verified 23 Aug 2026 |
Westlaw Advantage: 7 days
Thomson Reuters states it in four words on its own trial page: "Try Westlaw Advantage free for 7 days", directly above "No credit card needed". The form asks for name, email, phone and organization type and issues a OnePass credential.
Westlaw Edge: 7 days
Identical wording and identical mechanism to Advantage: "Try Westlaw Edge free for 7 days", "No credit card needed". Edge is the older generation, so this matters mainly if a firm is being quoted Edge rather than Advantage.
Practical Law: 7 days, and at most two trials per year
The only vendor in this table that publishes an annual cap on how many trials one person can take. Thomson Reuters words it as "up to two trials available per year", and the trial is tied to the Premium tier rather than to the product generally.
midpage: Two weeks
Stated on the pricing page as "All plans come with a two week free trial", and repeated in the page meta description. Starter is $30 per month and Pro is $80 per month billed annually, so the trial covers a product you can actually buy without a call.
Paxton AI: 7 days
The Individual plan button reads "Start Your Free 7-Day Trial". The plan behind it is $2,999 per user per year, described as saving 50 percent against monthly billing. Enterprise is volume-based and routes to a strategy call instead.
Bloomberg Law: 14 days, no card (previously recorded)
We could not re-verify this today. The trial request page sits behind a "Press and Hold to confirm you are a human" wall, and an invented control URL on the same host is refused identically, so no status code from that host means anything. The 14 day figure is what we recorded when the page was readable.
Trellis: 14 days (previously recorded)
The pricing page returns a Cloudflare 403 to us again. The 14 day trial and the tier prices were read first-hand on 5 August 2026 and corroborated against an archived copy of the plans page from 21 May 2026. Every tier covers a single state.
vLex and Vincent AI: Offered, length not published
vLex runs a live trial signup page that says only "Sign up for a free trial of vLex and experience all the features and benefits of AI-powered legal technology". No number of days appears anywhere on it. Third-party directories quote 30 days tied to booking a call, which vLex itself does not state.
Lexis+ with Protégé: 2 days (recorded 13 Aug 2026)
The shortest published trial we have ever recorded in this category. We cannot re-check it: lexisnexis.com refuses every automated request including an invented control URL, and headless browsers get the same refusal, so we flag the figure as previously recorded rather than current.
Harvey: None published
No trial, no published price and no self-serve signup. The pricing URL redirects to a 404. Harvey sells through a sales conversation, which is consistent with where it sits in the market.
CoCounsel Legal: None published
Thomson Reuters publishes plans-pricing pages for the 300, 500 and 700 tiers, and none of them carries a rate or a trial offer. The Westlaw products next to it do both, which makes the omission a choice rather than an oversight.
Lex Machina: None published
No price and no trial anywhere on the site. Lex Machina is legal analytics rather than general research, and it covers civil litigation only, so a short trial would arguably not tell you much about it either way.
Two vendors on that list deserve a note about why the entry is hedged. LexisNexis refuses automated requests from us so consistently that even a URL we invented, which cannot exist, is refused the same way, which means no response from that host tells us anything. Bloomberg Law does the same thing with a human-verification prompt. That is their right, and it is also why we will not print a current trial length for either one. Our fuller reading of what each vendor does publish sits on the LexisNexis free trial and Westlaw free trial write-ups.
Seven days to decide, three years to commit
The number nobody puts next to the trial length
Trial length is the number people search for. Contract length is the number that costs them money, and the two are rarely printed on the same page. Thomson Reuters advertises Westlaw Advantage at $399.75 per month for all states and federal coverage. Read on the live checkout on 1 September 2026, that rate is the three-year price with 18 percent applied; the undiscounted rate for the identical plan is $492.00 per month, and two years takes 12 percent off. So the widely quoted figure is real, and it is the price of a thirty-six month commitment that you are given seven days to evaluate.
| Vendor | Time to evaluate | What you commit to | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Westlaw Advantage | 7 days | Up to 3 years for the advertised rate | The rate Thomson Reuters advertises is $399.75 per month for all states and federal coverage. Read on the live checkout on 1 September 2026, that figure is the three-year price with 18 percent applied. The undiscounted list rate on the same screen is $492.00 per month, with 12 percent off at two years. You get seven days to decide whether to sign up for thirty-six months. |
| Practical Law | 7 days, twice a year maximum | Annual, no published rate | Seven days on the Premium tier, capped at two attempts in a year, against a subscription whose price is not published on any of the four segment pages. You are being asked to evaluate quickly and then negotiate blind. |
| midpage | Two weeks | Monthly at $30, or annual at $80 for Pro | The longest self-serve trial in the table sits in front of the smallest commitment. You can try it for two weeks and then pay $30 for one month. Nothing about that decision is hard to reverse, which is exactly why the trial can afford to be generous. |
| Harvey, CoCounsel Legal, Lex Machina | None | Quoted, annual, negotiated | At the top of the market the trial disappears entirely and is replaced by a pilot that sales scopes for you. That is not necessarily worse, but it is a different process: you evaluate under the vendor's supervision, on the vendor's timetable, with the price still unknown. |
Read down that table and the correlation is hard to miss, and it runs the opposite way to intuition. The longest self-serve trial belongs to the cheapest product. The shortest trials belong to the platforms with multi-year contracts and unpublished rates. At the very top, the trial disappears and becomes a scoped pilot that a sales team runs for you. A trial is a cost the vendor absorbs to reduce your risk, so the length tells you roughly how reversible the vendor believes the purchase is. When a vendor gives you seven days to assess a three-year decision, that is information about the contract rather than about the software. Our note on what Westlaw actually costs goes through the tier structure, and the Westlaw Advantage breakdown covers what is in the plan itself.
Five steps, seven days
How to spend a short trial so it answers something
Seven days is enough to answer the two questions that decide a legal research purchase, and nowhere near enough to change how a firm works. The difference between a useful trial and a wasted one is almost entirely whether you decided what you were testing before you registered.
Step 1
Before the clock starts
Write down five real questions from live or recently closed matters, with the answer you already know. Trials are short and the failure mode is spending them browsing. Having the answer already is the whole trick: it turns an impression into a test, because you can see immediately whether the tool found what you found and how long it took.
Step 2
Day one, coverage
Search for the oldest controlling authority you rely on and the most recent decision you know about. Those two probes tell you the real start year and the real update lag, which are the two coverage facts that decide whether a platform can do your work. Vendors publish coverage claims; the reporter dates in your own matters are the audit.
Step 3
Day two, verification
Take a case you know was overruled or superseded and see what the tool says about it. This is the single most important test and the one people skip. A research tool that finds cases but cannot tell you a case is dead has given you a liability rather than an answer.
Step 4
Midway, your worst query
Run the question you could never phrase properly in boolean, the one you usually solve by asking a colleague. If a platform earns its price anywhere, it earns it here, and if it cannot handle that query in a trial it will not handle it in month seven either.
Step 5
Before it expires, the exit
Ask what happens to your saved research, folders and annotations when a subscription ends, and get the answer in writing. When Casetext shut down in April 2025 its citation checking history had no export path, and every casetext.com URL now returns HTTP 410 Gone. Work saved inside a platform is only as durable as the platform.
The verification test in step two is the one worth insisting on. A tool that returns plausible cases and cannot tell you one of them was overruled has not saved you work, it has moved the work somewhere you are less likely to look. That is the mechanism behind the fake-citation sanctions now accumulating in US courts, and it is why we say plainly on every page that we do not have a citator. If checking that a case is still good law is the problem you are trying to solve, the honest recommendation is a platform that has one, and what a citator actually does explains what you would be buying.
Including where we are the wrong answer
Where Cases sits in a trial comparison
We do not run a free trial
We publish the price instead: 29 dollars per user per month, on the pricing page, self-serve, no quote and no sales call. A month at 29 dollars is a cheaper and more honest evaluation than a seven day trial attached to a three-year contract, and you can stop after it. That is the trade we made, and if a no-risk trial is a hard requirement for you then midpage and the Westlaw trials are the ones to start with.
We do not have a citator
If your reason for trialling platforms is that you need to confirm cases are still good law, we are not the answer and we would rather say so here than after you pay. KeyCite, Shepard\'s and BCite exist for that job and there is no free or cheap substitute for them. Trial Westlaw, Lexis or Bloomberg Law with the overruled-case test from step two and pick whichever handles it best.
What we are actually for
Asking a legal question the way you would ask a colleague and getting the on-point US federal and state cases back, with the holding surfaced and a real citation to check. If the query you could never phrase in boolean is the thing you would be testing during a trial, that is the exact gap we built for, and you can test it in the box above without registering for anything.
Asked verbatim in US search
Legal research free trial questions, answered
Does Westlaw have a free trial?
Yes. Thomson Reuters runs live trial pages for both Westlaw Advantage and Westlaw Edge, and both state "Try Westlaw free for 7 days" alongside "No credit card needed". We confirmed both pages were live and carrying that wording on 1 September 2026. You register with your name, email, phone and organization type and receive a OnePass sign-in rather than entering payment details.
How long is the Westlaw free trial?
Seven days, for both Westlaw Advantage and Westlaw Edge, as published on Thomson Reuters' own trial pages. Seven days is the standard across most of this category. It is short enough that you should decide what you are testing before you register, because a trial spent exploring the interface will not tell you whether the coverage or the citator is good enough for your matters.
Is there a free trial for LexisNexis?
LexisNexis has published trials, and the shortest one we have recorded in this category: two days for Lexis+ with Protégé, noted on 13 August 2026 when the pages were readable. We flag that as previously recorded rather than current, because lexisnexis.com now refuses every automated request we make, including a control URL that does not exist, so we cannot re-verify it honestly today.
Do you need a credit card for a Westlaw free trial?
No. Thomson Reuters states "No credit card needed" directly on the Westlaw Advantage and Westlaw Edge trial pages, and the same wording appears on the Practical Law trial. That is worth knowing because it removes the usual risk of an auto-renewing trial. You will still give a phone number and an organization type, and a sales conversation generally follows.
Which legal research tool has the longest free trial?
Of the lengths we could verify first-hand, midpage is longest at two weeks, stated on its pricing page as "All plans come with a two week free trial". Bloomberg Law and Trellis were both recorded at 14 days previously, but neither page was readable to us on 1 September 2026, so we cannot confirm those today. Everything else we verified runs seven days.
Does Bloomberg Law have a free trial?
Bloomberg Law runs a trial request page, and we recorded a 14 day trial with no credit card when the page was readable. We could not confirm it on 1 September 2026: the page sits behind a "Press and Hold to confirm you are a human" check, and an invented URL on the same host is refused identically, so no response from that host counts as evidence either way.
Does Vincent AI have a free trial?
Yes, vLex runs a live trial signup for Vincent AI, but it does not publish how long the trial lasts. The page says only that you can sign up for a free trial of vLex and experience all the features. Third-party directories quote 30 days conditional on booking a call, which vLex itself does not state anywhere on its own signup page, so treat that number as unconfirmed.
Does Harvey AI have a free trial?
No trial is published, and neither is a price. Harvey has no self-serve signup and its pricing URL redirects to a 404, so evaluation happens through a sales conversation and a scoped pilot. The same is true of CoCounsel Legal and Lex Machina. At the top of this market the free trial is replaced by a supervised pilot on the vendor's timetable.
Can you get a second free trial?
Practical Law is the only vendor here that publishes an answer, and the answer is yes but capped: Thomson Reuters states "up to two trials available per year". No other vendor in this table publishes a repeat policy, which in practice means it is decided by a sales representative rather than by a rule. If you need longer than seven days, asking for an extension is usually more productive than trying to start again.
How much is Westlaw after the free trial ends?
Thomson Reuters publishes $399.75 per month for all states and federal coverage, and that is the three-year commitment price with 18 percent applied. On the live checkout on 1 September 2026 the undiscounted rate for the same plan was $492.00 per month, with 12 percent off for two years. Online pricing covers firms of up to 10 attorneys; larger firms are directed to sales.
Is a 7 day trial long enough to evaluate legal research software?
It is long enough to test coverage and verification, which are the two things that actually decide the question, and too short to change how you work. Use it deliberately: search for the oldest authority you rely on to find the real start year, then look up a case you know was overruled to see whether the tool tells you. Those two probes answer more than a week of browsing.
What should I test during a legal research free trial?
Run five questions from real matters where you already know the answer, so you are testing the tool rather than forming an impression. Check the oldest case you rely on for coverage depth, check a case you know is no longer good law for citator quality, and ask what happens to your saved work if you cancel. Casetext users learned that last one the hard way.
Trials and pricing
Skip the trial queue.
Ask a question now and see what comes back, with no registration and no seven day clock. 29 dollars per month when you want it, published on the page, no quote and no sales call. Informational research, not legal advice, always verify the citation.