Alexi

Legal research costs $400-600/hour in associate time and takes hours of manual digging — searching Westlaw/Lexis, reading irrelevant results, synthesizing case law. Clients increasingly refuse to pay for research hours on invoices. AI can compress a 4-hour research memo into 20 minutes, but most firms have no approved tool

BigLaw firm with 1,000+ lawyers has decades of work product locked in DMS folders — the precedent brief the partner drafted 3 years ago is unfindable, institutional knowledge walks out the door when partners leave, and junior associates waste hours recreating work that already exists somewhere in the system

Solo/small firm needs case law research but Westlaw and LexisNexis charge $300-500/month per user — either pay and bleed, negotiate a discount every year, or go without and risk missing relevant authority. Free alternatives (Google Scholar, Fastcase) have gaps in coverage and no citator

Litigation associate searches for case law supporting a specific legal argument but keyword search returns 500+ results, most irrelevant — the actual proposition ('courts have held that X constitutes Y under Z standard') is buried across dozens of cases that happen to contain the same terms but reach different conclusions

Solo or small firm attorney pays $25-50/month per user for DocuSign or Adobe Sign just to get engagement letters and retainer agreements signed — the firm sends maybe 15 documents a month and doesn't need enterprise features, but there's no middle ground between free tools with no audit trail and expensive enterprise platforms

Patent attorney drafting a 30-page specification has to manually verify that every reference label ('processor 235', 'memory 240', 'display 245') is used consistently across the specification, claims, and drawings — one mislabelled reference or antecedent basis error can trigger a USPTO objection that costs the client $2,000+ in additional prosecution fees and delays the application by months

Litigation team needs to verify every citation in a 40-page brief before filing — manually checking each case reference against the original source takes a full day, and a single bad citation can result in sanctions or a lost motion