Legal Research Guide
10+ Best Casetext Alternatives
Looking for a Casetext alternative? Discover 10+ top tools that lawyers use for legal research, drafting, and case analysis.
Jun 7, 2025
Legal research can be a daunting task. If you've ever spent hours sifting through case law only to find irrelevant information, you know how frustrating and time-consuming it can be. This is where Casetext comes in. Casetext is a powerful legal research tool that enables you to quickly and easily find the information you need. However, it's not the only option available.
In this guide how to do legal research?, we will explore the best Casetext alternatives that can help you do legal research more efficiently. We will also discuss how you can use AI to speed up your research and writing process. So, if you're ready to learn how to do legal research like a pro, keep reading.
Table Of Contents
What is Casetext?
Casetext Pricing Explained Casetext offers a single-tier pricing plan for all of its resources. This means you get access to everything for one price, including statutes, regulations, and case law in the federal courts and all fifty states. The plan also includes the use of Casetext’s citator, SmartCite, which leverages its CARA tool to help find the most relevant cases for your specific fact pattern. The pricing for Casetext is $65 per month when billed annually, or $75 per month when billed monthly. There is also the option to add additional seats for $40 per month.
Related Reading
• What Tools Do Lawyers Use
• AI in Legal Research
• What Is Legal Research
• Importance of Legal Research
• Legal Research Paper Format
• Can ChatGPT Write Legal Blogs
• Impact of Technology on Law
• Will AI Take Over Lawyers
• ChatGPT for Lawyers
Casetext Key Features
Parallel Search
Casetext's Parallel Search technology allows you to input a fact or issue in natural language, and the software will find relevant cases that discuss that fact or issue. This is transforming because it allows you to search legal databases in the same way you would ask a human legal expert, making legal research more intuitive and efficient.
Smartcite
Smartcite is Casetext's citation analysis tool. It helps you understand the history and treatment of a case, statute, or regulation you are citing. This ensures that you are using good law and enables you to avoid any legal pitfalls associated with citing negative or overruled authority.
Case Analysis
Casetext's Case Analysis feature provides a comprehensive overview of a case, including its procedural history, key facts, legal issues, and holdings. This helps you quickly understand the essentials of a case without having to read the entire opinion.
Brief Analysis
With Brief Analysis, you can upload your legal briefs to Casetext, and the software will analyze them for citation errors, legal research gaps, and potential weaknesses. This helps you strengthen your arguments and improve the overall quality of your briefs.
Legal Research
At its core, Casetext is a powerful legal research tool that allows you to search for case law, statutes, regulations, and secondary sources with ease. Its advanced search filters and natural language processing capabilities make finding relevant authority a breeze.
Document Review
Casetext also offers document review capabilities, allowing you to upload and analyze contracts, discovery documents, and other legal texts. This can help you identify key issues, inconsistencies, and potential risks within your papers.
Case Summaries
The Case Summaries feature provides concise, accurate summaries of thousands of cases, allowing you to quickly grasp the main points without having to read the full opinions.
Statutes And Regulations
Casetext includes a comprehensive database of federal and state statutes and regulations, making it easy to find the laws that govern your legal issues.
Practice Area Resources
Casetext offers a wealth of resources organized by practice area, including articles, guides, and forms. These can help you stay informed and up to date on the latest developments in your field.
Case Law Database
Casetext boasts a vast database of case law, comprising millions of opinions from federal and state courts. This ensures that you will have access to the authority you need to support your legal arguments.
Advanced Search Filters
Casetext's advanced search filters allow you to narrow your results by jurisdiction, date, court, and more. This helps you find the most relevant and current authority for your legal issues.
Citation Checker
The Citation Checker tool helps you ensure that your legal citations are correctly formatted and accurate. This can save you time and prevent embarrassing errors in your legal writing.
Legal News
Stay informed with Casetext's Legal News feature, which provides updates on important cases, legislative developments, and other legal news that may impact your practice.
Client Collaboration
Casetext offers tools that facilitate collaboration with your clients, allowing you to share research, documents, and updates securely and efficiently.
Research History
Never lose track of your legal research again. Casetext saves your research history, so you can easily revisit previous searches and findings.
Bookmarks
Use Bookmarks to save essential cases, statutes, and other legal authorities for quick access later.
Annotations
Make notes directly on legal documents with Casetext's Annotations feature. This helps you keep track of your thoughts and insights as you conduct your research.
Document Comparison
Casetext allows you to compare two legal documents side-by-side, making it easy to identify differences and discrepancies.
Integrated Workflow
Casetext integrates with popular legal practice management and document automation software, streamlining your workflow and improving efficiency.
Mobile Access
Access Casetext on the go with its mobile-friendly platform, ensuring you can conduct legal research anytime, anywhere.
10+ Best Casetext Alternatives
1. Otio: Your AI-Powered Research Workspace
Researchers, knowledge workers, and students often find themselves overwhelmed with content. They cope with it using a patchwork of bookmarking, read-it-later, and note-taking apps. However, these fragmented tools are not practical, and the problem is only worsening as content creation becomes increasingly easier. Otio provides a single AI-powered workspace for researchers that helps them collect, extract, and create from a wide range of data sources.
2. CourtListener: Free Legal Opinions
CourtListener is a free legal research website sponsored by the Non-Profit Free Law Project. It contains millions of legal opinions from federal and state courts, updated daily. Users can search by case name, topic, or citation.
3. Claude AI: AI Document Analysis
Claude AI is an AI software for lawyers that can read and analyze legal documents up to 75,000 words. It provides detailed explanations, identifies key insights, and offers nuanced interpretations of complex legal language. It is beneficial for contract review, due diligence, and risk management.
4. Caselaw Access Project: Historical Case Law
The Caselaw Access Project (CAP) offers free access to all official, book-published US case law from 1658 to June 2018. This project was undertaken by the Harvard Law Library to make all published US court decisions freely available online.
5. Genie AI: AI Legal Assistant
Genie AI is an AI legal assistant that helps with drafting, editing, and reviewing legal documents. It supports collaboration and is compatible with most document formats.
6. FindLaw: Searchable Supreme Court Decisions
FindLaw offers free online legal content, including case law from state and federal courts, case summaries, statutes, and legal news. It also provides a searchable database of US Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1760.
7. Ever Law: E-Discovery and Legal Research
Everlaw is a cloud-based e-discovery and legal research tool for litigation attorneys and legal teams. It helps users find and review data used as case evidence and can process large volumes of documents quickly.
8. Justia: Stay Updated with Legal Summaries
Justia offers a free database of case law, codes, statutes, regulations, and articles related to federal and state cases. It also provides free newsletters that deliver the latest legal news and summaries directly to your inbox.
9. Patent Pal: AI-Powered Patent Drafting
PatentPal is an AI tool that helps patent attorneys draft patent applications. It can generate detailed descriptions, abstracts, claims, and figures, making the patent drafting process faster and more efficient.
10. Legal Information Institute: US Law Online
The Legal Information Institute (LII) at Cornell Law School provides free access to US laws, including statutes, regulations, and legal materials. It is a valuable resource for finding legal information and understanding the law.
11. Relativity: E-Discovery and Legal Data Management
Relativity is a legal software platform that offers e-discovery, legal analytics, and machine learning capabilities. It helps legal teams process, review, and produce documents for corporate litigation, internal investigations, and compliance management.
Please let me know if you want me to write about any of these Casetext alternatives in more detail.
Pros and Cons of Casetext
Pros of Casetext
Casetext hits a lot of the right notes. First, it’s affordable, especially compared to Westlaw and Lexis. Second, it includes a citation checker similar to Shepard’s and KeyCite, which is more intuitive and easier to use. Third, it integrates with other tools you might use, such as Microsoft Word and Slack.
Cons of Casetext
Casetext’s main drawback is its limited coverage of secondary sources. If you rely heavily on treatises, law review articles, or practice guides, you’ll want to look elsewhere. Additionally, Casetext has no open API, which means developers can’t build custom integrations or tools on top of the platform. Finally, it doesn’t offer access to public records, which could be a dealbreaker for some users.
Related Reading
• Generative AI for Lawyers
• Best Free Legal Research Databases
• Legal Research Examples
• Legal Research Process
• Methods of Legal Research
• How to Do Legal Research as a Paralegal
• Types of Legal Research
• Legal Research Topics
• Automation in the Legal Industry
• How to Research a Law Firm
Supercharge Your Researching Ability With Otio — Try Otio for Free Today
Content Overload is a Significant Challenge for Many Knowledge Workers, Researchers, and Students. Many of them resort to using a combination of bookmarking, read-it-later, and note-taking apps to manage their workflows. This is a manual and fragmented approach that can be inefficient and frustrating. Otio provides a solution to this problem by offering an AI-native workspace that helps you manage your research more effectively.
With Otio, you can collect information from a wide range of sources, including bookmarks, tweets, books, and YouTube videos. The tool then uses AI to extract key takeaways from these sources, providing you with detailed notes and the ability to ask source-grounded questions. This makes it easier to understand and remember the information you have collected.
Finally, Otio can help you create draft outputs using the sources you have gathered. This means you can go from a reading list to a first draft much faster than you could on your own. If you are a researcher or student, Otio is a tool you should consider using.
Related Reading
• Steps of Legal Research
• Law Firms Using AI
• Legal AI Software
• Best AI for Legal Research
• Best Legal Research Software
• Harvey AI Competitors
• Lex Machina Competitors
• Westlaw vs LexisNexis
