Along with yesterday’s announcement of new AI features, Thomson Reuters quietly mentioned a revised commercial model that purportedly will allow customers to benefit from new advancements in Thomson Reuters’ products. The newest AI offering, CoCounsel Legal, will be offered through multiyear subscriptions with “mostly” increased annual fees. According to TR, these subscriptions will include continual upgrades at no additional cost.
Admittedly, it sounds a little cryptic. But if I’m following the idea correctly, the concept is similar to Microsoft 365: you pay a subscription and then as upgrades occur, your cost goes up some but you automatically get the upgrade. The concept addresses, at least marginally, a couple of problems most legal vendors present to their customers, particularly when it comes to AI-related offerings, at least in my opinion.
Secret Pricing
The first is pricing. With most products, you ask the price, and you get an answer. With legal tech products, particularly subscription-based ones, you get a lawyer answer: “It depends. But let me demo the product for you and you can use it for a bit and then we will talk price.”
That’s like a car dealer saying, “I can’t tell you the price of the car but hop in for a test drive. Better yet, keep it for a week or two and then come back and I’ll let you know the price after I find out more about you.”
The vendors will claim they need to understand your usage patterns before discussing price. I suspect it’s more about customizing deals based on who’s asking and how much they think you can pay. Legal tech customers are often left playing the Price is Right to get any idea of cost.
Over Segmentation
The second problem in my view is product line proliferation or over segmentation. Most of the leading legal vendors offer so many products that do similar things, it’s hard to keep track of. And each slightly different product often comes with a higher price point. LexisNexis, for example, offers Lexis+, Lexis+AI, Protégé, Lexis Create+, and Lex Machina, all of which do some sort of AI legal research and analytics.
TR offers Practical Law, Checkpoint Edge, Westlaw Classic, Westlaw Edge, Westlaw Precision with CoCounsel, HighQ, CoCounsel Core, and now CoCounsel Legal.
Another legal tech provider, vLex, offers Vincent AI, vLex Analytics, Docket Alarm, Fastcase Legal Research, vLex Legal Research, Next Chapter, QuoLaw, and a slew of other offerings according to its website,
It’s enough to make your head spin.
But Why??
The vendors got into this in part due to the rapid advancements in AI and wanting to appear to stay ahead of the competition. And because they wanted to charge customers extra for each new advancement. Since the advancements were coming at such a fast and furious pace, the vendors just added a new product with a new name each time there was an advancement, even if it was slight. Each of these developments was a separate a la carte menu item. The result? A technological arms race that had customers dazed and confused. Quite frankly, I write about this stuff and talk to vendors regularly and even I can’t keep track of this stuff.
And pricing that was just as confusing and non-transparent. A customer could buy some or all of the menu items but the price in many cases was negotiable as the AI vendors raced to procure an increased customer base for their rapidly developing AI product base. In their efforts to stay ahead, they came out with advancements that really didn’t offer that much different but were hyped as a big advance. So, pricing could likely be a little flexible.
The Problem for Lawyers
For lots of law firms, this array of products and models and unclear pricing presents an issue. For larger firms, IT personnel will likely be dealing with the vendor and may understand the offerings. But they then have to explain them to the lawyers making the final decision who have neither the time nor interest in understanding the nuances and differences in the various products.
So, they either buy none, some, or all without really understanding what they are getting, whether they really need what they are buying, or not buying what they really need. Then when it’s time for implementation, the lawyers using the products may be just as confused and as a result the products go unused.
The situation is even worse in small firms with limited or no IT personnel. Think about it. You’re a full-time practicing lawyer and managing partner in a small shop with little time to spare. You think you need a set of AI tools. But which ones and for what? The first vendor you talk to gives you five products to pick from. A second vendor gives you seven. A third vendor only gives you four. But you can’t understand what they all do or whether you need all that each vendor offers. On top of that, you can’t find out the cost until you at least sit through multiple different demos.
The problem is compounded by the use of too much tech jargon by vendors instead of plain English to describe what their products do. Vendors sometimes get comfortable talking to IT personnel who may understand the jargon but forget that IT personnel have to then describe the offerings to the lawyers who don’t know the jargon. It’s no wonder lawyers have a sour taste for technology.
TR’s New Plan
The new TR pricing plan, if it does what it appears to, is at least a step, albeit small, in the right direction. Buy one product and then get upgrades instead of a new product offering and different name (with a modest price increase, whatever that means). Less confusion, less work required to understand what each new product is. Simpler, cleaner. Some sanity in the AI arms race.
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the first thing he did was jettison the array of products Apple was offering to a confused customer base. Perhaps legal tech vendors should do the same. The legal profession is already skeptical of technology; clarity and simplicity aren’t just nice to have, they’re essential.
Stephen Embry is a lawyer, speaker, blogger, and writer. He publishes TechLaw Crossroads, a blog devoted to the examination of the tension between technology, the law, and the practice of law.
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