# Lg · Legal — element 42 of 58 > Contracts without the counsel bill. Turns legal drag into reviewed documents. - **Group:** 9 · Back-office - **Necessity:** Optional - **Price band:** $ · under $30/mo - **Maturity:** Emerging - **Edition:** v2026.Q3 · verified 2026-09-13 ## Leading tools (v2026.Q3) - **Common Paper** — free standards, ai negotiation - **SpotDraft** — startup clm, humans included - **Spellbook** — ai lawyer in word - **Termly** — policies and consent, cheap - **Ironclad** — the clm heavyweight ## Our take AI handles the routine 80%: NDAs, standard terms, first-pass review. Pay a human for the 20% that can kill you. ## Combines with In, Cm ## The top 5 — deep dossier (verified 2026-09-13) Common Paper, for the startup whose legal is a tax and not a department — free, lawyer-committee-maintained standard agreements (40,000+ downloads, 63% of contracts signed within 24 hours) plus Gerri, an AI negotiation agent that starts at $0 and runs $500/mo at volume. SpotDraft is the pick at the first legal hire — a real CLM with implementation, migration, and template setup done for you; Spellbook when contract work happens in Word next to an actual lawyer; Termly (or iubenda) for the privacy-policy-and-cookie-banner chore every website owes; Ironclad when you scale into procurement-grade contracting. Harvey is deliberately not ranked: it is the enterprise-law power tool for AmLaw firms and Fortune 500 legal departments, not your seed-stage NDA queue. And the honest baseline underneath all of it: a $20 frontier-model plan already does competent first-pass contract reading — the paid tools earn their keep on playbooks, workflow, audit trails, and signatures, not raw comprehension. 1. **Common Paper** (Common Paper (YC, Uncork, boldstart)) — Free (2 agreements/mo) · Startup $50/user/mo · Growth $100/user/mo · Gerri AI agent free (3 agmts) → $500/mo · Enterprise custom. Best for: Startups that want NDAs, Cloud Service Agreements, and DPAs closed in hours on open-source-style standard terms — before hiring anyone with a bar card. Why: The standards are the moat: 19 agreement types (NDA, CSA, DPA, BAA, AI Addendum...) drafted and maintained by a committee of dozens of attorneys, released CC BY 4.0, with 40,000+ downloads and 63% of contracts signed within 24 hours (vendor, Aug 2026). Gerri, its AI negotiation agent, reviews counterparty redlines against playbooks and drafts counterproposals from $0. Because both sides start from known-fair terms, there is less to negotiate at all — 47% reduction in counterparty paper. Watch: Built for SaaS sales paper; it is not a repository for employment, IP, or financing documents. Per-user pricing plus a separate Gerri subscription adds up. Adoption stats are vendor-reported with no independent audit. [https://commonpaper.com](https://commonpaper.com) 2. **SpotDraft** (SpotDraft (Draftspotting Technologies)) — Quote-based — priced per user or per contract volume; implementation, template setup, and legacy migration included. Best for: The first-legal-hire moment: an end-to-end AI CLM (draft → negotiate → sign → renew) that a one-person legal team can actually run. Why: The startup-weight CLM: 450+ companies on an AI-native platform spanning workflows, repository, native e-sign, and VerifAI — Word-embedded review the vendor claims runs 15x faster (Aug 2026). The $54M Series B (2024, vendor-confirmed amount) funds a genuinely serviced onboarding — six weeks to live with templates and integrations configured for you, which matters when nobody on the team has done a CLM rollout. Watch: No public pricing — you are negotiating a quote with a company that sells negotiation software. Overkill before you have real contract volume; the 15x VerifAI figure is a vendor claim with no independent benchmark behind it. [https://www.spotdraft.com](https://www.spotdraft.com) 3. **Spellbook** (Spellbook (Rally Legal Inc.)) — Quote-based per seat · 7-day free trial · aggregators put it around $150–200/user/mo (unverified). Best for: Startups whose contracts live in Microsoft Word — a multi-model AI (GPT-5, Claude) that reviews, redlines, and drafts where the lawyer already works. Why: The largest install base of any Word-native legal AI: 4,500+ legal teams across 80+ countries, including Dropbox, eBay, and Fender (vendor, Aug 2026). Playbooks encode your positions, Associate runs multi-document workflows, and zero-data-retention plus SOC 2 Type II answers the confidentiality objection that kills raw-chatbot review. For a startup with one lawyer — or outside counsel it wants to use less — it converts frontier-model capability into billable-hour savings. Watch: Unpublished pricing and a per-seat model aimed at lawyers, not founders; if nobody on the team opens Word, it has nowhere to live. G2 love (4.7) is real but self-selected. [https://spellbook.com](https://spellbook.com) 4. **Termly** (Termly Inc.) — Free (1 policy, 10k banner views) · Starter $14/mo · Pro+ $20/mo per site (annual) · Agency custom. Best for: The compliance chore every startup with a website owes: privacy policy, terms of service, cookie banner, and DSAR forms — generated and auto-updated for $0–20/mo. Why: Covers 28 data-privacy laws across 150+ countries (GDPR, CCPA, IAB TCF 2.3) with auto-updated policies and scheduled cookie scans, so the documents track regulation without anyone reading the Federal Register (pricing page, Aug 2026). This is the category where paying a lawyer hourly is malpractice-grade waste — the work is templated by definition. iubenda (team.blue) is the equally good EU-flavored alternative from €4.99/mo. Watch: A generator, not counsel: unusual data practices, health data, or children's products need a human privacy lawyer. Per-website pricing stings multi-domain startups; deeper consent-management and DSAR automation at scale belongs to compliance platforms (→ Cm). [https://termly.io](https://termly.io) 5. **Ironclad** (Ironclad, Inc.) — Quote-based — product mix (CLM, AI, e-sign) + deployment tier + extras; no published numbers. Best for: The graduation platform: when contracting becomes a company-wide process with procurement, approvals, and audit demands, not a founder's inbox. Why: The category-defining CLM crossed $200M ARR in February 2026 (vendor) and is pushing hardest into agentic review with Jurist, its 'AI contract partner' that works counterparty redlines autonomously. Workflow designer, Smart Import repository, and native e-sign make it the system-of-record play; a Forrester TEI study claims 314% ROI (vendor-commissioned — treat accordingly). Watch: Enterprise pricing and enterprise implementation — wrong tool before roughly Series B. The quote-based model means startups routinely discover the number is five figures. The Forrester ROI figure is paid research. [https://www.ironcladapp.com](https://www.ironcladapp.com) ### How to choose - If You're pre-revenue and just need an NDA, CSA, or DPA to close the next deal → Common Paper's free standards — 63% get signed within 24 hours because both sides start from known-fair terms. Have a frontier model explain any clause you don't understand; pay a human only for the 20% that can kill you. - If Sales contracts are queueing and legal headcount is zero → Gerri at $0→$500/mo before you buy a CLM — it reviews counterparty redlines against a playbook in minutes and escalates only what needs a human. - If You're making the first legal hire or pushing past ~50 contracts a quarter → SpotDraft — quote-based, but implementation, migration, and template setup are done for you, which is worth more than a price sheet to a legal team of one. - If The real work happens in Word between your lawyer and outside counsel → Spellbook — playbooks plus multi-model review with zero data retention beats pasting confidential paper into a consumer chatbot. - If It's just the website: privacy policy, ToS, cookie banner → Termly at $0–20/mo or iubenda from €4.99 — never pay hourly rates for templated documents. Graduate to Ironclad only when procurement-grade contracting arrives, and to Harvey only if you become a law firm. ### The field (18 more) Harvey, Juro, LawVu, iubenda, Ivo, Robin AI, LinkSquares, Luminance, LawGeex (fading), Genie AI, Bonterms, oneNDA / Claustack, Crosby, Docusign IAM, Lexion (acquired), Evisort (acquired), Atrium (dead), Claude / ChatGPT (raw) Full dossier data: https://elems.ai/e/lg.json --- Source: [elems.ai](https://elems.ai/e/lg.html) — the periodic table of the AI-led startup. Data: https://elems.ai/elements.json (CC BY 4.0, cite elems.ai).