LawVu vs Plexus: how they compare in 2026
LawVu and Plexus both sell in house legal teams a legal operating system and both use the name, LawVu as LegalOS and Plexus as an AI powered Legal OS. Both cover intake, matters and the contract lifecycle, and both come from Australasia, LawVu from Tauranga in New Zealand and Plexus from Melbourne. LawVu goes further on spend, with electronic billing and AI review of invoices against billing guidelines, and on Microsoft, with LawVu Draft in Word and a connector in Microsoft's own Power Platform catalog. Its AI layer adds an Assistant that updates records once a user approves, LawVu Lens for executed contracts and a legal assistant for business users. Plexus reviews the first version of each new contract automatically, answers questions through Plexus Counsel and checks marketing against Australian advertising law. Both publish their contract terms and subprocessor lists. LawVu offers five data regions and names Azure OpenAI, while Plexus names OpenAI and runs contract review on Amazon Bedrock in Australia.
At a glance
All 15 axes, side by side
The same grid applied to every vendor in the index, graded from public sources. Hover a grade to see what the letter means on that axis.
AI Centrality
How much of the product is actually AI. Whether the machine learning is the mechanism the buyer is paying for or a feature layered onto conventional software, and whether the vendor is specific about which is which.
LawVu sold a legal workspace for about a decade before its AI layer, and its intake, matters, contracts, spend, reporting and document modules run as workflow and record keeping without a model. The AI now reaches most of those modules. LawVu Intelligence covers an Assistant for in house legal users and a legal assistant for business users in the Business Portal. It also covers AI intake that routes requests by risk and urgency, contract extraction, bulk contract import, invoice extraction and billing guideline review. LawVu Lens turns executed contracts into structured data on obligations and risk, and LawVu Draft, acquired as ClauseBase in December 2025, drafts and redlines inside Word. The June 2026 LegalOS launch recast the platform around these agents, and the homepage describes LegalOS as designed with AI as a foundational layer. In the help center in October 2026 the Assistant and the Business Portal assistant were in a beta open by invitation, and the workflow builder was marked coming soon. The record keeping product is still the base the AI reads from and writes to.
AI runs through a contract, matter and approvals platform that also works without it. With AI features on, each new contract gets an automatic review when its first version is uploaded. The review holds an executive summary, a risk summary covering legal, commercial and operational risk, and a clause table. The table compares the draft with the customer's precedents, or with general drafting principles where none are loaded. Summaries sit in each document's Key Facts tab, and intake autofill reads an uploaded contract for party names, dates, values and jurisdictions. Marketing Wizard is where the model carries the work, rating each marketing asset high, medium or low risk against more than 230 Australian laws, codes and regulations. Its November 2025 launch said compliant content is approved automatically, and the product page says only high risk items reach legal. Intake forms, templates, approval routing, signing, the repository and Insights reporting all run with AI switched off. AI features arrived in 2023, six years after the platform launched in March 2017.
Citation Accuracy and Hallucination Disclosure
Whether the vendor publishes measured accuracy on citations and assertions, grounds output to primary sources, and says plainly what its system does when it does not know. Legal has a documented public record of fabricated citations reaching filed briefs, so an untested claim of accuracy is not evidence.
LawVu's AI answers from the customer's own records and points back to them. LawVu Lens reviews clauses side by side with citations back to the source contracts, and the Assistant may cite the LawVu records an answer came from. The Business Portal assistant answers business users from knowledge content available to them and shows excerpts from the source where available, so the user can verify the response. It says when it cannot find a reliable answer rather than generating one. LawVu Draft reviews contracts against the customer's own clause library, precedents and imported playbooks, so a reviewer can trace a redline to the standard behind it. LawVu's AI service terms say outputs may be incomplete or inaccurate and must be reviewed before use. The help center says the Assistant may return incomplete or incorrect information and that important information should be verified. The figures LawVu attaches to its AI measure speed, such as up to five times faster reviews in Draft, rather than accuracy, error rates or results on a test set.
Grounding differs by feature. Contract review compares a draft with precedents the customer uploads, and its Confirmed Clauses list shows what matched the customer's standard. Since March 2026 Plexus Counsel shows the name of the Knowledge material behind an answer, and Marketing Wizard recommendations carry citation links to the Australian legislation behind them. Where no Knowledge is loaded, features fall back to the broader model, and document summaries and Draft Advice always use it. No accuracy measure accompanies contract review, summaries, redlines or Marketing Wizard. The one figure comes from Plexus's own testing of intake autofill, which it says fills about 75 percent of custom questions from the document. The AI Security Fact Sheet names hallucination and lists the mitigations: grounding in the customer's documents, prompt guardrails, tags on all AI generated content and review by a person. The Counsel help article warns that answers may include details that seem relevant but are not in the document.
Autonomy and Oversight Model
What the system decides on its own, what a lawyer must approve, and whether the vendor documents where the review point sits. A tool that drafts under review and a tool that files without one are different products and different risks.
In LawVu the AI proposes and a person approves. The Assistant asks for approval before it creates or updates a record, and it cannot delete records, approve or reject contracts or invoices, or fully automate complex workflows. It acts only on information the user already has permission to see. Assistant supported actions are labeled in the product and recorded in a full audit trail, and actions taken through the MCP server land in the same activity log as actions taken by people. Agentic workflows run on events, schedules or on demand inside guardrails the legal team sets, and the homepage promises human in the loop guardrails on all agentic capabilities. The AI service terms say outputs cannot be relied on for decision making without human review. The acceptable use policy bars fully automated decisions with legal or similarly significant effects on individuals without human oversight, testing or prior risk evaluation. A help article describes the coming workflow builder as running autonomous workflows for the Assistant without human intervention, and states no limit on what those workflows may change.
Most AI output waits for a person. Redline suggestions arrive as cards showing the current wording, the proposed wording and the reason, stay visible only to the user, and apply as tracked changes once accepted. AI comments follow the same rule, and since August 2026 redlining asks the user to confirm details it is unsure of, such as an address, rather than filling them in. Draft Advice, offered to select organizations, is generated when a matter is raised and stays visible only to the legal team until a lawyer posts it. A warning appears when it is posted unedited, and once posted it is emailed to the matter's stakeholders. AI filled intake answers are marked, and users are told to check each one because answers can trigger delegation of authority rules. Playbooks are reviewed by their creator before publishing and can route a question to a named person in legal. Two features act without a person. Contract review runs automatically on the first version of each new contract, and Marketing Wizard's launch materials describe compliant content being approved automatically, while its help article routes submissions to a legal stakeholder for approval. How a risk rating is set, and what happens to a medium risk item, is undescribed.
Operational and Outcome Evidence
Named, dated evidence that the product works in production at real firms or legal departments. Case studies with figures and identified customers count. Unattributed testimonials and launch announcements do not.
LawVu's customer stories name the organization and the person speaking, and several carry figures. At Sizzling Platter, LawVu bulk created more than 700 matters from the legal team's spreadsheets during a three month implementation, which corporate counsel Samuel Gray says saved up to 175 hours of data entry. Dentsu has centralized more than 10,000 contracts in LawVu across more than 40 markets. The AES legal team says its use of AI rose from 30 percent to 80 percent in 2024, with LawVu Draft a large part of that. A healthcare legal operations lead, whose organization is not named, says the average master services agreement went from 21 business days to six. The stories carry no publication date, and each figure is the customer's own account without a stated method. The June 2026 LegalOS release names Discord, Etsy, Employment Hero, The Pokémon Company and Estée Lauder among customers. The plans page adds modeled returns, such as 344 percent a year for a team of five.
Named customers report figures. ENGIE Australia's head of legal and general counsel describe a 90 percent cut in contract execution time, a 50 percent year on year rise in executed volume and workflows finishing in 4.5 hours on average. That covers more than 320 users across 13 business units. Caidya's chief legal officer describes growth from 125 users to about 1,500 across more than 40 regions. Since October 2023 the team has handled more than 15,000 documents and more than 700 legal requests, answered in under two days on average. Lion's marketing team reports campaign approvals up to 90 percent faster and trade promotion permit costs up to 50 percent lower, across about 1,000 promotions since 2017. Shorter customer cards cite Noumi, with NDAs executed in 1.5 hours, LocalEyes, with promotion approvals seven times faster, and PMG, with approved terms in 24 hours. The case studies carry no dates or method, and Caidya's region count reads 41 in its case study and 43 on the customers page. Plexus says more than 200 legal teams use it, and its about page says more than 250 companies.
Privilege and Confidentiality Posture
How client confidences are handled: attorney client privilege and work product treatment, segregation of one client matter from another, whether client data trains any model, and what the vendor commits to in writing rather than in marketing.
LawVu states its training position in its contract and in its AI FAQ. The AI service terms bar third parties from using customer data or outputs to improve or train AI and machine learning models, including LawVu's AI services. The AI security and privacy FAQ says LawVu trains no models on customer data, directly or indirectly, and that inputs and outputs to the AI services are not used for training. LawVu operates under an exemption from Microsoft's standard Azure OpenAI monitoring, so Microsoft may not access or monitor its usage, and interactions with the AI tools are transactional and retain no data. Each customer's data is logically segregated from other customers' data. Restricted matters are visible only to members added to them, and the Assistant, the Business Portal assistant and the MCP server all work within each user's existing permissions. The SaaS terms let LawVu collect anonymized statistical data about use, such as session data, page loads and which features are used, to improve services and develop new ones. The SaaS terms protect customer data through a mutual confidentiality clause, which allows disclosure to a party's lawyers and other professional advisors and does not mention legal privilege.
Customer data stays out of shared models by policy. The security page, the AI page and the AI Security Fact Sheet say customer data never trains public or shared AI models. The Counsel help article says it never trains or improves the model for anyone else. Each customer sits in its own databases and vector stores, which Plexus describes as zero data crossover between tenants. Staff reach customer data only with the customer's approval or under authorization from senior management and security. The Subscription Terms bind both parties to hold each other's confidential information in trust and use it only for the agreement, and their data processing addendum limits processing of personal data to the customer's instructions. Neither contract mentions AI training. Inside an account, permission sets grant review and view rights per document type and organization unit, and legal teams can leave comments on matters that only legal can see. The Draft Advice article says OpenAI did not keep the data or use it for training. Privilege and work product go unmentioned.
UPL and Professional Responsibility Posture
Whether the vendor is clear that it supplies a tool rather than legal advice, who its audience is, and how it addresses unauthorized practice of law, competence and supervision duties, and jurisdiction limits. ABA Formal Opinion 512 is the reference point. Where the advice line is not the duty a product raises, the axis is read through the nearest professional duty it does raise: judicial conduct rules and the reviewing duty for products sold only to courts, and the duty to bill for time actually spent for products that draft time entries.
LawVu draws the advice line in its terms and in the product. The AI service terms say outputs cannot be relied on as any form of legal or other advice. The acceptable use policy, which every user of the generative AI features must acknowledge, bars using the AI services as a substitute for licensed legal advice. It also bars letting unqualified individuals generate or rely on outputs such as legal documents without appropriate professional legal supervision, and relying solely on AI output for legal or regulatory determinations without human review. Business users reach AI directly through the Business Portal assistant, whose help article says it does not provide legal advice and that legal advice comes from the customer's legal team. LawVu sells to in house legal departments, and the legal team decides who can use the Assistant and what business users can see. The policy applies one standard everywhere LawVu sells and sets no jurisdiction specific limits.
The advice line is drawn in the contract and in the product. The Subscription Terms state that the platform is not intended to constitute, or be a substitute for, legal advice, and make the customer solely responsible for the documents and results it generates. The AI Security Fact Sheet calls output general guidance rather than final legal advice and says anything with legal or commercial consequences should be reviewed by someone competent to judge it. Marketing Wizard results say they are not legal advice and do not replace a full legal review, and the tool is intended for the Australian market only. Draft Advice warns that AI may produce incorrect, non compliant, non standard or incomplete content. Plexus also practices law. Under its Subscription Terms Promotion Wizard counts as legal advice, covered by Plexus's professional insurance as a law firm. Marketing Wizard work from customers without an in house legal team goes to the Plexus legal team. Plexus Counsel is marketed as a digital lawyer. How the product supports a customer lawyer's competence and supervision duties is unaddressed.
AI Governance and Bias Disclosure
Published governance over model behavior: who owns it inside the vendor, what is tested before release, and what is disclosed about disparate output across matter types, parties, or populations.
LawVu's trust center carries an AI Governance page and a set of AI Principles covering AI used inside LawVu and AI in the product. The six principles are user centric, transparent, reliable, safe and secure, trustworthy, and privacy and data governance. They commit LawVu to be transparent about its AI practices, technology, suppliers and data usage, and to monitor AI tools to reduce adverse impacts. The principles are reviewed annually. The AI FAQ says LawVu completes privacy impact assessments for all new AI features, and that its AI systems inherit the security and privacy controls of its hosted software inside the ISO 27001 certified program. Generative AI features are switched on by opting in, and organization administrators enable or disable new features at any time. On ISO 42001, the AI product pages say LawVu is certified, while the FAQ, updated March 2026, says it is aligned and pursuing independent audit and certification. The framework is written as principles and assessments, without a named owner of AI governance or reported testing or bias results.
No AI governance framework sits behind the product. There is no responsible AI page, no named owner for model behavior, no description of testing before release, no results on output quality and no ISO/IEC 42001 certification. The AI Security Fact Sheet says AI supports rather than replaces human decisions and that all AI generated content is tagged, and the AI page says every AI output is auditable. The rest of the security material covers ISO 27001, SOC 2, encryption and tenant isolation, which govern information security rather than model behavior. Whether review quality differs by contract type, jurisdiction or language is unaddressed. Marketing Wizard is built only for Australian law, while Plexus serves enterprises across Australia, New Zealand and Singapore alongside global consumer brands.
AI Safety and Data Stewardship
Retention, deletion, access control, and what happens to prompts and documents after they are processed. Whether the vendor states its subprocessors and its incident practice, or leaves the buyer to assume.
LawVu puts retention, deletion, access, subprocessor and incident terms in its published contract documents. The data processing addendum commits to breach notice without undue delay and, where feasible, within 72 hours. It gives 30 days' notice of a new subprocessor with 15 days to object on data protection grounds, and requires return and deletion of personal information at termination. The SaaS terms give the customer a month after termination to request a copy of its data and let backups hold it for up to a year. The subprocessor list, last updated 4 August 2026, names nine entries with the activity and processing country for each, including Microsoft Azure for hosting and Azure OpenAI for AI services. AI calls are transactional and keep no data, while Assistant logs stay visible in the product for 30 days and are available from LawVu after that on request. Access runs through roles and permissions, restricted matters, SAML single sign on with SCIM provisioning and enforceable multifactor authentication. Data is encrypted at rest with AES 256 and in transit with TLS 1.2 or higher, and LawVu keeps a 35 day point in time restore plus a daily backup to a secondary subscription.
Data handling is set out across the security pages and the Subscription Terms. Data is encrypted with TLS 1.2 or later in transit and AES 256 at rest, encrypted backups allow recovery to any point in the previous seven days, and uploads are scanned for viruses and malware. Independent security firms run penetration tests, and staff reach customer data only with the customer's approval or under authorization from senior management and security. The data processing addendum in the Subscription Terms commits each party to report a personal data breach without undue delay. It deletes personal data at the end of the agreement and promises notice before a new subprocessor is engaged. Its Annex III names 19 subprocessors, including Amazon Web Services, Heroku, Google Cloud, DocuSign, Auth0 and OpenAI, without purposes or locations. Retention periods for documents, prompts and outputs are unstated, and files uploaded to a Counsel thread stay available for the life of the thread. The older data security page, last reviewed July 2023, still cites ISO 27001:2013, and the privacy policy carries no breach notice of its own.
AI Liability and Recourse
What the vendor stands behind contractually when its output is wrong. Indemnities, caps, carve outs, insurance, and whether any of it is published or only reachable through a negotiated agreement.
LawVu publishes the contract that allocates loss. The SaaS terms, which apply to order forms signed after 13 May 2024, cap each party's liability in a calendar year at the fees paid or payable for that year. They exclude indirect and consequential loss, lost profits and loss of data, and lift the cap only for personal injury, death or fraud. LawVu indemnifies the customer against third party claims that its use of the services or platform infringes intellectual property. The indemnity excludes unauthorized use or modification, breach of the agreement, materials LawVu did not supply, and third party or personal data. The AI service terms, effective 30 April 2026, carve AI output out. LawVu does not warrant that outputs are complete or accurate, accepts no liability for loss relating to them, and requires the customer to review every output before use. The services are provided as is. New Zealand law governs, or Delaware law for customers in the United States, with arbitration in each.
Two documents set the terms, and both cap and disclaim. The Subscription Terms, which Plexus says it does not amend, cap total liability at the fees paid in the 12 months before a claim. They exclude lost profits, lost data and indirect loss, exclude implied warranties, and make the customer solely responsible for documents and results the platform generates. The Legal Gateway Terms of Use, which carry no date, set the same 12 month cap with remedies at Plexus's election and leave reliance on generated material at the user's own risk. Their warranty exclusion is subject to warranties implied by the Competition and Consumer Act 2010. Neither document carries an indemnity from Plexus. The AI Security Fact Sheet points to an intellectual property indemnity that OpenAI gives under its enterprise terms. Promotion Wizard output sits under Plexus's professional insurance as a law firm, while the software carries no insurance or service level commitment. Victorian law governs for customers in Australia, New Zealand and Asia Pacific.
Practice Systems Integration Depth
How deeply the product reaches into the systems legal work already lives in: document management such as iManage and NetDocuments, Word and Outlook, contract lifecycle management, matter management, e-billing, and court filing systems.
LawVu documents its integrations at the level an implementer needs. Microsoft's own connector reference lists LawVu for Power Automate, Power Apps, Copilot Studio and Logic Apps. It documents 26 actions, such as creating a matter or uploading a file, and 14 triggers, such as a contract changing state. It also sets a limit of 100 calls per connection a minute and a separate sign in for LawVu's region for United States government customers. The REST API uses OAuth clients, covers matters, contracts, files, users and invoices, and supports webhooks. The MCP server lets Claude, ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot read and write LawVu data within each user's access, and every action goes to the activity log. LawVu Draft is a Word add in. Outlook and Gmail sync turns email into structured requests, intake also runs through Teams and Slack, and DocuSign, Adobe Sign, Dropbox Sign and Formstack are embedded for signature and document generation. An iManage integration, built and supported by partner Blue Car Technologies, mirrors files and folders between LawVu and iManage and syncs edits both ways. Help guides cover SharePoint, Box and Google Drive.
Word and Outlook are the main connections. The Word add in, released in December 2025, creates documents from templates, saves them as contract records and uploads new versions. Since July 2026 it also runs AI review and redlining inside Word for users with a Microsoft 365 business license. The Outlook add in, also released in December 2025, turns emails into contracts or matters, attaches conversations and sends documents for signature, keeping documents and contract data in sync. Plexus announced both on Microsoft's marketplace in February 2026. Word Online editing has run since 2023, and a Gmail add in raises matters. Signing runs through an embedded DocuSign integration or a customer's own DocuSign Part 11 account for organizations under FDA rules. Single sign on works with Entra ID, ADFS, Okta, Google and SAML, across up to 1,000 domains. There is no public API yet. Plexus's roadmap, dated July 2026, targeted a documented platform API for September 2026 and a Legal MCP server for Claude, Copilot or ChatGPT for October 2026, and the release notes through September 2026 show neither.
Deployment Model and Data Residency
Where the software runs and where the data sits. Multi tenant cloud, single tenant, private deployment, on premises, and whether region of residence is a published option or an enterprise conversation.
LawVu runs on Microsoft Azure, with each customer's data logically segregated from other customers' data. Customers choose one of five regions, in Australia, the United States, Europe, Canada or the United Arab Emirates. LawVu contractually agrees to store data in the chosen region, with primary and secondary data centers inside its boundaries. Microsoft's connector reference also lists a LawVu region for United States government customers. AI processing can leave the storage region, and the subprocessor list says where. Azure OpenAI processing follows the SaaS agreement for United States and European data stacks, runs in Europe for Australian and UAE customers, and runs in the United States for Canadian customers. The AI FAQ says data processed outside the region is handled only transiently to produce the output, while the AI product page says data stays in the chosen region at rest. A 99.95 percent monthly uptime commitment sits in the service level addendum, with support around the clock through in app chat and response times set by severity.
Plexus runs as a multi tenant service on AWS, with each customer in its own databases and vector stores. Personal information is stored on servers in Australia, and the privacy policy says data may also sit in the United Kingdom and the United States. Since August 2026 AI contract review runs on Amazon Bedrock in Australia, which Plexus ties to data residency and sovereignty requirements. The Counsel launch in November 2025 described Australian infrastructure with residency controls for customers that need them. The other AI features call OpenAI's enterprise API, and where that processing happens is unstated. Region choice is not a product setting, and there is no single tenant or private deployment. The contract management page gives implementation times of one to two weeks, and two to three weeks on average to full deployment.
Security Certifications and Trust Center
Independent attestation a buyer can pull without a sales call: SOC 2, ISO 27001, penetration test summaries, a trust center with current reports and named scope rather than a badge image.
LawVu has held ISO 27001 certification since April 2019, maintained through annual internal and external audits. Its compliance page dates its first SOC 2 audit to January 2020 and its first SOC 1 audit to February 2021. It was certified in 2025 against the Dubai Electronic Security Center's standard for cloud providers serving UAE government and semi government entities, and it holds AssuranceLab seals of compliance for HIPAA, CCPA and GDPR. The ISO statement of applicability and certificates, the SOC reports, penetration test reports and the business continuity plan sit in the LawVu security pack. A visitor gets the pack through a request form after accepting a notice of confidentiality, or by email under a nondisclosure agreement. Annual penetration tests come from CREST certified vendors, and Qualys scans the application for new vulnerabilities daily. AssuranceLab is the only assessor named on the open pages, so the ISO and SOC auditors, report types and periods are in the pack. LawVu's AI product pages say it is certified to ISO 42001, while its AI security and privacy FAQ, updated March 2026, says it is aligned with the standard and pursuing certification.
Plexus states ISO 27001:2022 certification on its security page and in its information security policy, last reviewed March 2024. Its AI page and AI Security Fact Sheet add SOC 2 Type 2 compliance, which the security page leaves out. No auditor, certificate number, scope or date appears with either. A security portal holds the disaster recovery report, the ISO 27001 certificate, a penetration test attestation letter and network security, risk management and secure development policies. Access comes through a request form, and verification takes up to three business days. The portal's document list has no SOC 2 report. Penetration tests come from independent security firms Plexus does not name. The older data security page, last reviewed July 2023, cites the 2013 edition of ISO 27001.
Model Supply Chain Disclosure
Which models sit underneath, whose they are, where they run, and whether the vendor commits to telling customers when that changes. A legal buyer inherits every dependency it cannot see.
LawVu names its AI providers feature by feature. Its AI FAQ lists Microsoft Azure AI Foundry, using Azure OpenAI and Foundry models, for contract extraction, bulk import, billing guidelines and drafting and review. Azure Document Intelligence handles invoice extraction, Azure Content Understanding joins it for Workspace Intelligence, and Azure AI Search supports drafting. The Copilot integration uses the customer's own Microsoft Copilot licenses. The subprocessor list states where Azure OpenAI processing runs for each data region, and the data processing addendum gives 30 days' notice before a new subprocessor. A help article says LawVu Draft uses Azure GPT 4 by default and lets administrators add Anthropic Claude or OpenAI GPT models with their own API keys, stored encrypted on Draft servers. The AI FAQ says customers cannot bring their own model to LawVu, which provisions and manages every model. Model versions outside Draft, and notice when a model inside Azure changes, are not part of the published terms.
OpenAI is the named provider. The security page, the AI page and the AI Security Fact Sheet describe OpenAI's enterprise GPT models behind Plexus AI, and the Subscription Terms list OpenAI among the subprocessors. Since August 2026 AI contract review runs on Amazon Bedrock in Australia, with the model there unnamed. The Draft Advice article, dated August 2026, still refers to OpenAI's GPT 3 API, and Marketing Wizard's launch post describes a proprietary AI engine. No model version is mapped to a feature. A change of provider carries notice, since the data processing addendum promises notice before a new subprocessor and its transfer clauses set one month's warning. A change of model within a provider carries none. The Draft Advice article says data sent to OpenAI was not kept or used for training.
Commercial Transparency
Whether a buyer can learn what this costs without entering a sales process: published rates, the unit being charged, what sits behind an enterprise tier, and what implementation adds.
LawVu's plans page sets out the structure of its pricing without figures. Three LegalOS plans build on each other. Matters covers intake and matter management, Essentials adds contract management, and Ultimate adds spend management. Price depends on the plan chosen and the number of users. LawVu Draft is sold as an add on or on its own, and the agentic workflow builder is a paid add on. Each plan carries a standard onboarding fee in its first year, support and customer success are included, and a few integrations cost extra. Spend management is priced in tiers by the number of law firms a customer works with rather than by its legal spend. Bulk contract import is included once at implementation and quoted separately after that. The Assistant is free to explore during its beta, and the help center says LawVu expects to add usage tracking and consumption based pricing tiers, with advance notice before any change.
Prices are quoted on request. The help center defines the unit of charge as the Professional User license, charged per person who meets the definition. The Subscription Terms set fees by the number of Professional Users and Workflows in the order form and bill overage pro rata. Fees rise by 7 percent plus CPI on each anniversary, and contracts renew automatically for 12 month periods. A free trial with no payment card includes Approve and eSign, document storage, legal requests, Marketing Wizard and Plexus Counsel, with no stated length. There are no tiers, feature splits or implementation fees on the open pages. Promotion compliance is sold at 50 percent below traditional legal review with a guaranteed 24 hour turnaround. Random Draw, the trade promotion draw service, asks for sign in only at payment and caps prizes at $200,000.
Firm and Practice Coverage
Who the product is actually built for. AmLaw, midlaw, small firm and solo, in house departments, government and courts, and which practice areas are supported rather than merely claimed.
LawVu is built for in house legal departments. Its industry pages cover healthcare, higher education, software and technology, financial services, government, energy, manufacturing and insurance. Role pages address general counsel and chief legal officers, legal operations, IT teams and teams with no legal technology yet. Customer stories filter by Asia Pacific, North America, the United Kingdom, Europe and the United Arab Emirates. Data regions cover Australia, the United States, Europe, Canada and the United Arab Emirates, and Microsoft's connector reference adds a LawVu region for United States government customers. LegalOS covers intake, matters, contracts, spend, reporting and documents, with contract management in the Essentials plan and spend in Ultimate. Law firms appear as outside counsel, submitting invoices and seeing their matters, invoices and billing guidelines through a self service portal. LawVu Draft supports multilingual drafting, which the AES legal team, half of whom speak Spanish, cites as a reason for adoption. Law firm practice management, litigation support and legal research sit outside the product.
Plexus serves in house legal teams in larger companies, with marketing, sales, procurement and operations staff using it to request legal help, approve marketing and run promotions. Its case studies come from energy, consumer goods, clinical research and lending, and its pages show consumer brands such as Nike, Woolworths and Nestlé. Plexus describes its enterprise base as spanning Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. The Subscription Terms contract through Plexus Gateway for Australia, New Zealand and Asia Pacific and through Legal Gateway International for the rest of the world. Marketing Wizard covers Australian advertising law only, and customers without an in house legal team can send marketing reviews to Plexus's own lawyers. Law firms are not a target segment, and no team size or contract type is ruled out.
The 12 legal signals, side by side
Recorded rather than graded. These are the questions a practitioner has to answer before a tool touches a client matter, and the answers are taken from public material only.
Client Data in Training
Can material a lawyer puts into this product be used to train a model?
LawVu's AI service terms, part of the customer agreement, bar third parties from using customer data or outputs to improve or train AI and machine learning models, including LawVu's AI services. The AI security and privacy FAQ adds that LawVu trains no models on customer data, directly or indirectly, and does not let its service providers train theirs. Inputs and outputs to the AI services are not used for training. LawVu operates under an exemption from Microsoft's standard Azure OpenAI monitoring, so Microsoft may not access or monitor that usage.
The SaaS terms let LawVu collect anonymized statistical data from use of the services, such as session data, page loads and which features are used, to improve services and develop new ones.
Customer data stays out of public and shared models by policy. The security page and AI Security Fact Sheet say customer data never trains public AI models, and the AI page says it never trains public or shared models. The Counsel help article says it never trains or improves the model for anyone else. The Subscription Terms and the Terms of Use leave training unmentioned. They bind Plexus to use confidential information only for the agreement and to process personal data on the customer's instructions, which limits use without naming AI.
The privacy policy mentions integrated AI tools for document discovery and scanning without a training position. Whether Plexus trains models of its own on customer content is unstated. The Draft Advice article says data sent to OpenAI was not used to train its models.
Prompt and Output Retention
How long does the product keep what a lawyer typed, and can that be set to zero?
Calls to LawVu's AI services are transactional, and the AI FAQ says they retain no customer data. Data processed outside the customer's region is handled only transiently to produce the output. What persists sits in the product. Assistant conversations, actions and approvals are logged for audit, visible in LawVu for 30 days and available from LawVu after that on request, with no end date given. Extracted contract data and key dates become part of the customer's records.
At termination the customer has a month to request a copy of its data, and backups may hold it for up to a year. The data processing addendum requires deletion of personal information under the agreement.
Retention is acknowledged without a period. Files uploaded to a Counsel thread stay available for the life of the thread and do not join the document list, and accepted AI summaries, comments and redlines become part of the document record. The Draft Advice article says OpenAI did not keep data sent through its API. The data processing addendum deletes personal data at the end of the agreement unless European or UK law requires it to be kept.
Encrypted backups allow recovery to any point in the previous seven days. There is no stated period for prompts, Counsel conversations or outputs during the subscription, and no customer setting controls it.
Ethical Walls and Matter Segregation
Does retrieval respect the firm’s ethical walls, or can the model read across them?
LawVu keeps its own permission model. A restricted matter is visible only to people added to it as members, and for anyone else it effectively does not exist. Administrators see it in a restricted entities report with only its ID, type, state, owner and manager. Contracts created inside a restricted matter, and statements of work created inside those contracts, inherit its members, though existing contracts linked to it later do not.
Security groups such as matter administrators, contract administrators and teams set what each user sees, and legal service providers can join restricted matters but cannot restrict them. The Assistant, the Business Portal assistant and the MCP server act only within the user's existing access. The model is LawVu's own, separate from the iManage or SharePoint workspaces it syncs with.
Plexus runs its own permission model. Core, full and custom permission sets grant review and view rights per document type, scoped to the company's structure, and since May 2026 legal teams can leave comments on matters that only legal can see. Insights can hide sensitive document types, and only users with account administration rights can upload or change the Knowledge the AI draws on. Draft Advice stays visible to the legal team until a lawyer posts it.
No permission is specific to AI features. Between customers, each tenant has its own databases and vector stores, and Plexus staff reach customer data only with the customer's approval or under authorization from senior management and security.
Third Party Request and Subpoena Notice
If someone subpoenas the vendor for a firm’s data, does the firm hear about it first?
LawVu's data processing addendum commits it to notify the customer promptly of any legally binding request for disclosure of customer personal information by a regulatory body, unless the law prohibits notice. The commitment covers requests addressed to LawVu or any of its subprocessors. The addendum also commits LawVu to tell the customer about monitoring or investigations by a regulatory body. Regulatory bodies are defined to include government departments and regulatory and statutory bodies entitled to regulate or investigate data security and privacy.
The SaaS terms add that a party required by law to disclose the other's confidential information must notify the other immediately in writing where permissible and disclose only what is required. LawVu issues no transparency report. Once a calendar year, under a nondisclosure agreement, a customer can have the latest independent audit report, with an audit at its own cost where the report is not enough.
The Subscription Terms commit to notice. Clause 6.4 allows confidential information to be disclosed where law, a regulator or a court requires it, provided Plexus gives as much notice as possible where legally permitted. It also takes the customer's reasonable requests on the disclosure into account. The standard contractual clauses attached to the data processing addendum add prompt notice of a public authority request for transferred personal data, a review of its legality and periodic information on requests received.
The privacy policy, effective May 2023, separately allows disclosure to regulators, government authorities and parties handling a criminal investigation. There is no transparency report. Personal information is stored in Australia and may also be held in the United Kingdom and the United States.
Primary Law Corpus Provenance
Where does the law in this product come from, and does the vendor have the right to use it?
LawVu's AI works from the customer's own material. The Assistant draws on matters, contracts, policies, knowledge repositories and legal notes in the customer's LegalOS. LawVu Draft drafts and reviews from the customer's clause library, precedents and imported playbooks, with LawVu's base templates as a starting point. The Business Portal assistant answers business users from knowledge content the legal team makes available, and LawVu Lens reads the customer's executed contracts. No primary law collection, licensed legal content or update cadence sits behind the answers.
Most of the AI works from the customer's own material. Contract review compares documents with the customer's precedents, Counsel and Playbooks draw on Knowledge that administrators load as DOCX or PDF files under 25MB, and intake autofill reads the uploaded document. Counsel also draws on what its help article calls publicly available information and licensed data, without naming the sources or licenses. Marketing Wizard checks assets against more than 230 laws, codes and regulations for the Australian market and links each recommendation to the legislation behind it.
Which instruments make up that set, and how they are kept current, is unstated. Where no Knowledge is loaded, features use the general OpenAI model, whose training data is undescribed.
Good Law Verification
Does the product tell you when the authority it just cited has been overruled?
LawVu works on contracts, matters and invoices rather than case law, so a citator sits outside the product. Draft checks contracts against the customer's playbooks and clause library, and Lens cites back to the source contract rather than to legal authority. Lens identifies risky terms and inconsistencies across a contract portfolio against the customer's own standards. Keeping playbooks, clauses and policies in step with changes in law is the work of the legal team that maintains them.
Plexus reviews and drafts contracts and marketing material and does not cite case law, so a citator sits outside the product. Marketing Wizard links its recommendations to Australian legislation, and how amendments to those laws reach its rules, or which version applied to an asset, is undescribed. When a precedent in Knowledge changes, users regenerate contract review recommendations by hand, and each later version of a contract needs its review regenerated the same way.
Refusal and Uncertainty Behavior
What does the product do when the answer is not in the corpus?
The Business Portal assistant has a stated path for questions it cannot answer. When it cannot find a reliable answer it suggests another way to look, recommends creating a legal request or says it could not find one. It does not generate answers that the available information cannot support, and where available it shows excerpts from the source so the user can check the response. Its help article adds that mistakes can occur and important information should be verified.
The legal team's Assistant may return incomplete or incorrect information, its own help article says, and it asks for approval before it changes any record. No confidence indicator appears on AI output in Lens, Draft or either assistant.
Two features hold back when the input is unclear. Intake autofill leaves a field blank when the contract does not contain the answer. Since August 2026 AI redlining asks the user to confirm details it is unsure of, such as an address, rather than filling them in. AI answers in intake are marked, and users are told to check each one because answers can trigger delegation of authority rules. Contract review does not run on documents with unresolved tracked changes, bulk uploads or legacy files, and reviews only the main document.
Plexus Counsel has no described way to decline a question, and its help article warns that answers may include details that seem relevant but are not in the document. Draft Advice warns a lawyer who posts it unedited.
Fabricated Citation Record
Does a public court record exist addressing fabricated or hallucinated legal citations in output from this product?
The AI Hallucination Cases database maintained by Damien Charlotin, which records court decisions worldwide that address hallucinated AI content and the tool involved where known, has no entry naming LawVu, LawVu Draft, LawVu Lens or ClauseBase. LawVu drafts contracts and answers questions from an in house team's own records rather than producing court filings.
The AI Hallucination Cases database maintained by Damien Charlotin, which records court decisions worldwide that address hallucinated AI content and the tool involved where known, has no entry naming Plexus, Plexus Counsel or Legal Gateway. Plexus reviews and drafts contracts and marketing material for in house teams rather than court filings, and Marketing Wizard's citations point to Australian legislation.
Bar Guidance Alignment
Has the vendor engaged in public with the ethics opinions its buyers are bound by?
LawVu's acceptable use policy refers to professional duties in general terms. It bars using the AI services as a substitute for licensed legal, financial or other professional advice. It also bars letting unqualified individuals generate or rely on outputs such as legal documents without appropriate professional legal supervision, and relying solely on AI output for legal or regulatory determinations without human review.
The policy incorporates Microsoft's Enterprise AI Services Code of Conduct and forms part of the SaaS agreement. LawVu's guide to AI for in house teams covers adoption and procurement. None of these documents names a bar opinion, such as ABA Formal Opinion 512, or a professional conduct rule in New Zealand, Australia or elsewhere.
The product's language on legal advice is general. The Subscription Terms state that the platform is not a substitute for legal advice, and the AI Security Fact Sheet calls output general guidance rather than final legal advice. It asks that anything with legal or commercial consequences be reviewed by someone competent to judge it, and Marketing Wizard results say they are not legal advice. Promotion Wizard is legal advice from Plexus's own lawyers under its professional insurance as a law firm. No bar opinion, ethics rule or professional conduct guidance is named anywhere in the product material.
Billing and Fee Posture
Does the vendor address what happens to the bill when the work takes an hour instead of six?
LawVu's spend module is the payer's record of outside counsel fees. Firms upload invoices, including LEDES files, and see their matters, invoices and billing guidelines in a self service portal. The legal team receives, adjusts and approves invoices, routes approvals through drag and drop workflows and sends approved invoices to finance. AI extracts cost details from PDF invoices and flags discrepancies with billing guidelines, such as rate or scope issues, in real time.
Reporting tracks spend by firm and matter. Legal teams send RFPs with scope and budget, compare firm proposals side by side and receive AI provider recommendations. Spend management is priced by the number of firms a customer works with rather than by its spend. The billing guidelines are the customer's own, so any rule on how firms bill AI assisted work is set by the legal team in those guidelines.
Plexus is sold to in house legal teams and the business teams they support, so no client bill sits in the loop for its main buyers. Its savings claims address the buyer's own costs: a 65 percent lift in legal productivity, 90 percent faster contract execution and 70 percent fewer routine tasks on the home page. For marketing compliance it claims 30 percent lower external counsel spend and up to 70 percent fewer routine escalations, none with a stated method.
Promotion compliance, reviewed by Plexus lawyers, is priced at 50 percent below traditional legal review with a 24 hour turnaround. Fee treatment of AI assisted work for a firm that bills a client is outside the product's scope.
Outside Counsel Guideline Readiness
Can a firm get this vendor through a client’s AI clause without a bespoke negotiation?
LawVu's published documents answer the questions a client, auditor or regulator asks about AI and data handling. The subprocessor list names each provider with its activity and processing country, including Microsoft's Azure OpenAI service and where its processing runs for each data region. The data processing addendum, published with the SaaS terms, sets breach notice, subprocessor change notice and audit rights. The AI security and privacy FAQ maps each AI feature to the Microsoft service behind it and states the training and monitoring position.
The subprocessor list separates mandatory providers from optional ones that apply only when a customer enables a service, such as DocuSign, Formstack or Workato, and keeps a version history. The security pack adds the ISO 27001 statement of applicability, SOC reports and penetration test reports after a request form and a notice of confidentiality.
The documents a counterparty's AI clause asks for sit in the Subscription Terms, readable without an agreement. Annex III of the data processing addendum names 19 subprocessors, including Amazon Web Services, Heroku, Google Cloud, DocuSign, Auth0, OpenAI, InfoTrack, Zoho and Intercom, without purposes or locations. The addendum, with standard contractual clauses attached, promises notice before a new subprocessor is engaged.
Cloudflare, named on the data security page for web protection, is not on the list, and the AWS entry covers the Bedrock hosting behind contract review. Further security documents, including a penetration test attestation letter and the ISO 27001 certificate, sit in a portal reached through a request form.
Court Disclosure Support
If a judge’s standing order requires an AI disclosure, can the product produce one?
LawVu records what its AI does inside the product. Assistant supported actions are labeled, changes require user approval, and activity is recorded in a full audit trail showing what was done, when and who approved it. Actions through the MCP server go to the same activity log, and Assistant conversations, actions and approvals are kept for audit. Lens answers cite the source contracts and Lens exports structured datasets of clauses and obligations for due diligence, audits or external review, while the Business Portal assistant shows source excerpts.
The log records actions on matters and contracts rather than a per document record of the model used and the human check. Assistant logs stay in the product for 30 days, with older logs from LawVu on request. LawVu's output is contracts, matter records and internal advice, which rarely go before a court.
Plexus says every AI action is tracked and reviewable, and all AI generated content is tagged in the document. The activity feed records Plexus AI summaries, documents keep a version history with side by side comparison, redlines apply as tracked changes once accepted, and Counsel names the Knowledge behind an answer. Document and matter lists export to CSV up to 10,000 rows at a time, and the Usage and Risk and Suppliers reports in Insights export to Excel.
There is no export of the AI activity log, record of the model used or disclosure template. Plexus's output is contracts and marketing reviews rather than court filings.
The questions both sides leave open
Derived from the records above rather than written, so it cannot favor either vendor. Take these into both conversations and ask each side the same question.
- Good Law Verification
Which one fits
Choose LawVu if
- You manage outside counsel spend in the same system. LawVu's spend module takes invoices from firms, including LEDES files, extracts cost details from PDF invoices with AI and flags rate or scope issues against billing guidelines. Firms see their matters, invoices and guidelines in a self service portal, and spend pricing is tiered by the number of firms.
- You build on Microsoft. LawVu Draft runs as a Word add in that drafts and reviews from the customer's own clauses, precedents and playbooks. LawVu's connector is documented in Microsoft's own catalog for Power Automate, Power Apps, Copilot Studio and Logic Apps, with 26 actions and 14 triggers, and an MCP server and REST API sit alongside it.
- You need data held in a region you choose. LawVu contractually stores data in the customer's choice of Australia, the United States, Europe, Canada or the United Arab Emirates. Its subprocessor list states where Azure OpenAI processing runs for each region, and its data processing addendum commits to breach notice within 72 hours where feasible.
Choose Plexus if
- You want AI review on every new contract by default. Plexus reviews the first version of each new contract against the customer's precedents, flags missing or risky clauses and summarizes key terms. Its redline cards in Word show the current wording, the proposed wording and the reason, and change nothing until a user accepts them.
- You review marketing against Australian law. Marketing Wizard rates marketing assets high, medium or low risk against more than 230 laws and codes for the Australian market and sends high risk items to legal. Promotion Wizard produces trade promotion terms that Plexus's own lawyers review, under its professional insurance as a law firm.
- You want to try the AI before talking price. Plexus offers a free trial with no payment card that includes Approve and eSign, document storage, legal requests, Marketing Wizard and Plexus Counsel. Its Word and Outlook add ins, released in December 2025, create contracts and matters from documents and emails and send documents for signature.
In summary
LawVu
LawVu, based in Tauranga, New Zealand, is a legal operating system for in house legal teams marketed as LegalOS. It covers intake with AI triage, matters, contract lifecycle management, legal spend with electronic billing, reporting and a document repository. LawVu Intelligence adds an Assistant for the legal team, a legal assistant for business users and an agentic workflow builder, LawVu Lens analyzes executed contracts, and LawVu Draft works inside Word. The AI runs on Microsoft Azure AI Foundry and Azure OpenAI, customers choose one of five data regions, and LawVu publishes its SaaS terms, AI service terms, data processing addendum and subprocessor list.
Plexus
Plexus, founded in Melbourne in 2011, is a legal operations platform for in house legal teams covering intake, contracts, approvals, eSignature through DocuSign and marketing compliance. Plexus AI reviews the first version of each new contract against the customer's precedents, fills intake fields from uploaded documents and suggests redlines in Word. Plexus Counsel answers questions across up to ten documents under the legal team's playbooks. The AI runs on OpenAI's enterprise models, with contract review on Amazon Bedrock in Australia. Plexus publishes Subscription Terms with a data processing addendum naming 19 subprocessors and quotes prices per Professional User license.
Questions buyers ask
LawVu vs Plexus: which legal OS fits an in house team?
LawVu fits a team that wants spend management with electronic billing, deep Microsoft integration, a choice of five data regions and AI assistants for both legal and business users. Plexus fits a team that wants automatic AI contract review, marketing and promotion compliance for Australia and a free trial before buying. Both cover intake, matters and contracts, both publish their contract terms and subprocessor lists, and both price per user. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of October 9, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Which one names its AI model provider?
Both do. LawVu's AI FAQ maps each feature to a Microsoft service, with Azure AI Foundry and Azure OpenAI for extraction and drafting and Azure Document Intelligence for invoices. A help article says LawVu Draft uses Azure GPT 4 by default. Plexus names OpenAI's enterprise GPT models on its security and AI pages, lists OpenAI among its subprocessors and runs contract review on Amazon Bedrock in Australia with the model unnamed. Both give notice before a new subprocessor. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of October 9, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Do LawVu and Plexus train AI on customer data?
LawVu's AI service terms, part of its customer agreement, bar third parties from using customer data or outputs to train AI models. Its AI FAQ adds that LawVu trains no models on customer data and that Microsoft may not monitor its Azure OpenAI use. Plexus says customer data never trains public or shared models, on its security page, AI page and help articles, and keeps each customer in its own databases and vector stores. Its Subscription Terms do not name AI training. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of October 9, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Which integrates more deeply with Microsoft?
LawVu. LawVu Draft is a Word add in, its Power Platform connector is documented in Microsoft's own catalog with 26 actions and 14 triggers, and its MCP server works with Microsoft Copilot. Plexus offers Word and Outlook add ins, released in December 2025 and announced on Microsoft's marketplace in February 2026. They create contracts and matters, save versions and send documents for signature, alongside a Gmail add in and single sign on through Entra ID. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of October 9, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
What do LawVu and Plexus both leave unpublished?
Neither publishes an accuracy rate or testing results for its AI, and neither names bar guidance on AI. Neither offers an indemnity covering AI output, since both sets of terms disclaim the accuracy of outputs. Neither issues a transparency report on government requests, and neither commits to notice before a model inside its provider changes. LawVu's open pages leave out the auditors behind its ISO and SOC reports, and Plexus's leave out the auditor behind its ISO 27001 certificate. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of October 9, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Neither vendor paid for inclusion, placement or a grade, and neither reviewed this page before it published. Everything on it comes from public material on the dates shown. How the index grades.
LawVu's AI service terms bar third parties from training on customer data or outputs, and its AI FAQ says LawVu trains no models on customer data. Plexus's training statements sit on its security page, AI page and help articles and cover public or shared models, and its Subscription Terms do not name AI training. LawVu's AI product pages say it is certified to ISO 42001, while its AI FAQ says it is pursuing certification. Plexus lawyers review trade promotion terms as a service alongside the software. Neither vendor reviewed this page.