AnyLaw

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

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

Paralegal researching a motion needs to compare how 20 different courts ruled on the same legal question — pulling each case individually, reading full opinions, and manually tracking which courts went which way is a 6-8 hour task that grid search and multi-case comparison tools could compress to 30 minutes