LegalZoom vs Northwest Registered Agent: how they compare in 2026
LegalZoom and Northwest Registered Agent both form LLCs and corporations, act as registered agent and file the annual reports that keep a company in good standing, so a business owner forming a company will often weigh the two. They differ in scope, in what the AI does and in how the bill is built. LegalZoom covers more legal ground: trademarks and copyrights, legal forms, wills and trusts, and attorney plans through independent attorneys and its subsidiary law firm. Its AI is a set of tools around those products, from Doc Assist, a free document summarizer, to 24 MCP tools that let ChatGPT, Claude or Microsoft 365 Copilot form an LLC or book an attorney review. Northwest stays with formation, registered agent service and the business identity around them. Its assistant, Mark, works on the customer's own account: it answers from live filing, invoice and domain data, pays invoices and adds filings once approved, and offers 114 tools to outside assistants through an MCP server. On price, LegalZoom forms an LLC from $0 plus state fees with Pro at $249, while Northwest charges $39 plus state fees with a year of registered agent service, then $125 a year.
Which one fits
Choose LegalZoom if
- You need more than a company. LegalZoom also files trademarks and copyrights, sells legal forms and prepares wills, trusts and other estate planning documents.
- You want an attorney on call. LegalZoom's attorney plans connect customers to independent attorneys and, where authorized, its subsidiary law firm, and its Premium package includes 30 days of attorney consultations.
- You want the lowest price to file. LegalZoom's Basic package forms an LLC for $0 plus state fees, with Pro at $249 and Premium at $299.
Choose Northwest Registered Agent if
- You want registered agent service at a fixed yearly price. Northwest includes a year of it with its $39 LLC, then charges $125 a year per state, or $100 a year per state for five or more states.
- You want an assistant that acts on your account. Mark answers from live filing, invoice, domain, email and phone data, pays invoices and adds filings, and asks for approval before many of those tasks run.
- You want your own address off state filings. Northwest puts its address on state filings in place of yours and adds a free domain, website, email address and phone line.
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.
The AI is a feature layer on a business whose value stands without it. LegalZoom's AI features are Doc Assist, a free document summarizer; a business name generator, NAICS code search, expense categorizer, grant finder and search summaries; and AI research that produces most business license lists. The core products, such as entity formation and compliance filings, registered agent service, trademark and copyright filings, legal forms and attorney plans, run without the models.
Mark is an assistant layered on a formation and registered agent business that runs without it. Northwest forms LLCs, corporations and nonprofits, acts as registered agent in every state, files annual reports, amendments and foreign qualifications, scans mail, and supplies a business address, a domain, website, email and phone line. Mark sits in the client portal, answers questions from live account data and carries out account tasks such as paying invoices, adding products and creating email inboxes. The filings, mail handling and Corporate Guides keep working without the models.
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.
Grounding is claimed without sources a user can open or any measurement. The MCP catalog says documents are analyzed against a clause framework curated by attorneys, and Doc Assist gives clause highlights and common questions for the document type. The Doc Assist page and FAQ say summaries may be incomplete or inaccurate because they rely on rapidly evolving generative AI, and the AI Additional Terms make no promise that output is accurate. No accuracy figure, test or source linking is published.
Mark answers from live account data. Through the MCP server, each tool runs against the customer's account and returns structured results that the AI client turns into plain language. One of Northwest's sample questions asks whether a Washington annual report is due and what the state requires, yet nothing says which state rules Mark draws on or whether an answer shows its source. The Terms of Service say AI output is not advice and may contain errors or hallucinations. No accuracy figure, test or evaluation is published.
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.
Oversight is asserted through disclaimers and an optional attorney, without a described control on the AI. Doc Assist says its output is informational only and links to attorney review, and the AI Additional Terms say the AI Services do not provide legal advice. A March 2026 release says AI now completes about 70 percent of business license research requests and the rest still go to human review. It does not say what sends a request to a person or who that reviewer is. No lawyer reviews AI output by default.
Mark acts on the account, and the tool catalog sets out what each of its 114 tools may do. Sixty are read only and change nothing. Tools that add to the cart never charge; only checkout and tools marked as charging a saved payment method take money. Thirty three tools wait for the customer's approval in chat, some after a summary of the plan and price, and a cancellation asks for the reason and the customer's typed name before it runs. Seventeen are limited to the company owner, so shared collaborators cannot run them, and tools that delete, cancel or make a change that cannot be undone carry a warning. Payments use a method already saved on the account, card numbers and CVVs are never collected in chat, and a payment that needs a CVV goes back to the portal. The Terms say assistants perform only limited actions. Nothing describes what happens when Mark gives a wrong answer or takes a mistaken action, and a Corporate Guide joins on request rather than as a review step.
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.
Results are quoted without customer attribution or a method on the customer side. The business license release estimates about $3 million in LegalZoom's own savings in 2026 from automating license research, and a 2023 release says 85 percent of LegalZoom customers had not spoken to an attorney. These are the vendor's operating figures, not named customer outcomes, and the Terms say published reviews carry only a first name and last initial.
Northwest calls itself the largest business formation service in the United States, says it forms thousands of companies across the country every day and employs more than 1,300 people. Its LLC offer shows a Google rating of 4.7 from 1,881 clients, and its testimonials carry first names only. No named customer, dated outcome or usage figure for Mark is published.
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.
Confidentiality is asserted in general terms, and training use is permitted by policy. The Terms of Service say no attorney client relationship or privilege is created with LegalZoom, and the AI Additional Terms say the AI Services are not meant for privileged or highly sensitive information. The privacy policy says LegalZoom does not intend to collect attorney information in a way that waives privilege. The Doc Assist FAQ says uploads are stored in the user's documents center and may be used to train LegalZoom's own models but not third party AI tools. Nothing addresses separation between users or what an AI provider retains.
The Terms of Service, updated October 2026, treat input to and output from the AI features as customer data, with the customer owning the input and, where permitted, the output. Northwest describes its AI as self contained, running on its own LLMs in its own datacenter, with filings, invoices and conversations processed on infrastructure it operates. It never trains on customer chats or business data, never sells or shares conversation history and never hands AI work to a public model vendor. That training commitment appears in Northwest's AI material rather than in the Terms. A customer who connects an outside client such as Claude or ChatGPT sends the results the tools return to that client. Northwest states that it is not a law firm or fiduciary and gives no legal advice, so no privilege attaches, and an attorney client relationship exists only for a trademark matter accepted by Law on Call. Nothing describes how one customer's conversations and records are kept apart from another's beyond account sign in.
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.
The vendor states plainly what the product is and is not, who may use it and what it requires of its attorneys, with jurisdiction statements and a disclosure on every page. The Terms of Service open by saying LegalZoom is not a law firm, its forms are no substitute for an attorney, the customer represents themselves, and no attorney client relationship or privilege is created. They add that a customer who believes they received legal advice should not buy. The Terms of Use say LegalZoom reviews answers only for completeness and consistency and never applies law to facts. They define network attorneys' experience as five years' practice, errors and omissions insurance, good standing and no recent discipline. The Terms say LegalZoom is not a registered legal document assistant under California law, and the AI Additional Terms limit AI use to adults and say it is not legal advice. The footer names the subsidiary law firm, LZ Legal Services, LLC, as the only route to advice.
The Terms of Service state that Northwest is not a law firm or fiduciary and provides no legal advice, that its free forms are templates used at the customer's own risk, and that AI output is not advice. Trademark work runs through Law on Call, with an attorney client relationship limited to the accepted matter, and Northwest's trademark attorneys review intake forms and assess whether a mark is likely to register. Corporate Guides, a mix of paralegals, accountants, advisors, educators, lawyers and business experts, answer questions by phone and email. Northwest's description of Mark carries no statement that its answers are not legal advice, and no state rules on document preparation services are named.
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.
No AI governance position is published. The privacy policy says LegalZoom applies privacy by design, has privacy and security teams, and uses AI and human review in processing; the AI Additional Terms set rules for users. Nothing describes how the AI features are tested before release, who is accountable for them, or how they perform across users or document types.
No AI governance position is published. Northwest describes its AI as built and run in house without outsourcing, which concerns privacy and hosting. Nothing describes how Mark is tested before release, who at Northwest is accountable for it, or how its answers hold up across states, entity types or account situations.
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.
The privacy policy covers products as well as the website and lists the data collected. It names payment, shipping and identity verification vendors (WorldPay, Adyen, Stripe, Onfido, Veriff, FedEx, USPS), bars service providers from other uses, sets out access and deletion requests with an appeal route, and says multi factor authentication is in place for all customer accounts. The security page describes a dedicated security team, encryption of sensitive information and a responsible disclosure policy, and the Doc Assist FAQ says uploads are stored in the user's documents center. Retention is only at least as long as necessary, no AI provider is named, and no breach notification commitment is published.
The privacy policy limits collection to what Northwest needs to form and maintain an entity and run the services hired. Customers may ask for copies, correction, deletion with exemptions, limits on use and a portable export, and may appeal a refusal. Information is kept only as long as law allows or requires, and the California notice keeps each category for as long as its purpose needs unless law sets a longer period. Service providers work under contracts that require security, limited use and deletion when the work ends. Northwest says it performs nearly every service in house; Corporate Filings LLC processes card payments, and Northwest does not store card data. Two factor authentication is on by default. An in house IT team encrypts data, monitors applications for unusual use and attacks, tests new applications for vulnerabilities and keeps records of security issues, on servers and backup servers Northwest owns. No retention period is stated for Mark conversations, and no subprocessor list is published.
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.
Liability is addressed only by disclaimers and a standard cap. The AI Additional Terms provide the AI Services as is, with no promise that output is accurate, complete or fit for use. The Terms of Service and Terms of Use exclude indirect damages and cap liability at the amount paid. The LZ Guarantee is a refund policy on purchases and does not reach the free AI features.
The Terms of Service provide the services as is with no warranties, exclude indirect damages and liability for hacking, and cap Northwest's liability at the amount paid in the prior twelve months. The customer indemnifies Northwest for claims arising from its use, inaccurate information, document handling and Northwest being named as a defendant. AI output is described as not advice and possibly wrong, and nothing covers a wrong answer or a mistaken action by Mark. Washington law governs, claims must be brought within one year, and Northwest may choose individual arbitration or Spokane County court.
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.
Documented, verifiable integrations, with what each one does described. The AI capabilities page publishes 24 MCP tools in seven families, from LLC formation and business licenses to document analysis and attorney booking, each with its own page. It also publishes a catalog.json with schemas, annotations, versions and authentication, a text catalog for agents, connector setup documentation and six read only WebMCP browser tools. Named integrations cover ChatGPT, Claude and a Microsoft 365 Copilot agent. For a small business buyer, these assistants and Microsoft 365 are where the work happens.
The Northwest MCP server connects Mark's tools to Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini, Grok and any other client that speaks the Model Context Protocol, with a setup guide for each. Its catalog covers 114 tools in 14 groups: account and companies, filings and compliance, filing forms, documents, cart and checkout, invoices and payments, registered agent and mail, domains, DNS, domain forwarding, business email, hosting, phone service and utilities. Each entry gives what the tool does, a sample prompt, its access, who can run it and whether it waits for approval. A customer signs in with a Northwest account, and the same tools run inside Mark in the portal. No connection to accounting, banking or document storage software is described.
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.
Cloud delivery is implied, and neither hosting location nor tenancy is stated. The privacy policy covers US, EU and UK users but says nothing about where data is hosted or processed. The Doc Assist FAQ says the service is available only to US customers, which concerns eligibility rather than residency.
Northwest runs as a hosted service on its own infrastructure. It runs its own LLMs in its own datacenter, processes filings, invoices and conversations on infrastructure it operates, and keeps its own servers and backup servers, so Mark's AI processing stays with Northwest inside the portal. Through the connector, the customer's chosen AI client handles the conversation and the results the tools return. No region, residency commitment or tenancy model is stated.
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.
No independent security attestation is published. The security page, titled a trust page, describes a dedicated information security team, encryption, multi factor authentication and a responsible disclosure policy, and names no SOC 2 report, ISO certification or audit.
No independent security attestation is published. Northwest describes an in house IT team, encryption, monitoring for unusual use, security testing of new applications and its own servers, and names no SOC 2 report, ISO certification or PCI attestation.
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.
Proprietary models are mentioned without saying what sits underneath. The Doc Assist FAQ says inputs may train LegalZoom's own proprietary AI models and will not train third party AI tools, and the AI Additional Terms say the features use generative AI. No model, version or provider is named, and nothing commits to notice of changes. The ChatGPT, Claude and Microsoft 365 Copilot integrations run LegalZoom tools inside other vendors' assistants and do not disclose what powers LegalZoom's own features.
Mark runs on LLMs that Northwest operates and hosts in its own datacenter, and Northwest says it does not hand its AI to a public model vendor. The MCP server exposes the same tools to outside clients, and there the client's own model reads what the tools return. The models are not named, nothing says whether they were built in house or adapted from published models, and no notice of model changes is offered.
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.
A buyer can learn the price without a sales process. LegalZoom's own pages publish LLC formation at $0 (Basic), $249 (Pro) and $299 (Premium), each plus state filing fees. Premium's attorney consultations renew at $49 a month after 30 days, bookkeeping tools cost $9.99 a month after six months, and Doc Assist is free. The Terms of Service set out filing fees, a 60 day refund window and an installment plan for purchases of $200 or more.
Prices are public. The Northwest LLC costs $39 plus state fees and comes with a year of registered agent service, same day processing, Northwest's address on state filings, compliance reminders and the free identity services. Registered agent service then costs $125 a year per state, or $100 a year per state for five or more states, and covers up to 15 legal documents a year. The trademark service costs $599 per application, with the USPTO charging $350 per class on top. A free domain covers one name up to $25 a year, the website, email and phone line are free, and Mark comes with the client portal at no listed charge. Purchases are generally not refundable after 90 days and state fees never are, and any service can be canceled in the portal at any time with no fee.
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.
Who the product serves and what it covers are documented, with limits stated. LegalZoom serves small businesses and individuals across business formation and compliance, business licenses, trademarks, copyrights and provisional patents, wills, trusts, powers of attorney, prenuptial agreements, divorce and real estate documents. The stated limits are specific. Doc Assist is for US users only and takes text files up to 5 MB, license lists exclude tax registrations and professional licenses, and the AI features are not for privileged, highly sensitive or minors' information. The Terms say LegalZoom is not a registered legal document assistant in California. Firm segments and government use do not apply to a consumer product.
Northwest serves people starting and running businesses in the United States. It forms LLCs, corporations, S corporations and nonprofits, including companies for noncitizens, acts as registered agent in every state, and handles annual reports, amendments, reinstatements, dissolutions, foreign qualification, EINs, DBAs, trademarks, a business address and a virtual office. Its free forms library covers operating agreements, bylaws, resolutions, meeting minutes and guides to filing and defending a lawsuit. Mark covers the account's companies, filings, invoices, documents, domains, email and phone service. The Terms rule out legal advice, and nothing states which entity types, states or questions Mark does not handle. The product is not built for lawyers or law firms.
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?
Public material states that customer inputs may train the vendor's own models, with no matching term in the agreement. The Doc Assist FAQ says information provided through Doc Assist may be used to improve the product, which may involve training LegalZoom's own proprietary AI models, and will not be used to train any third-party AI tools. The Terms of Use license personal information only to enable the service and incorporate the Privacy Policy, whose product-development purpose covers developing machine learning or AI technologies without naming training. No opt-out is offered.
Northwest's AI material says it never trains on customers' chats or business data and never uses their companies as training material, and that its models run in its own datacenter. The Terms of Service, updated October 2026, treat AI input and output as customer data owned by the customer and do not repeat the training commitment.
Prompt and Output Retention
How long does the product keep what a lawyer typed, and can that be set to zero?
Retention is acknowledged without a period. The privacy policy says personal information is kept at least as long as needed for its purposes and legal obligations; the Doc Assist FAQ says uploaded documents are stored in the user's documents center and summaries in a LegalZoom database. Deletion is by verified request and may be declined.
The privacy policy keeps information as long as law allows or requires, and customers may ask for deletion, with exemptions. No retention period is stated for Mark conversations, AI output or documents requested through chat.
Ethical Walls and Matter Segregation
Does retrieval respect the firm’s ethical walls, or can the model read across them?
Controls on account access are the only separation described, and keeping one user's matters apart from another's goes entirely unmentioned. Nothing addresses separation between users' matters beyond controls on authorized contacts for account access.
Nothing describes how one customer's conversations, companies and records are kept apart from another's beyond account sign in. Inside an account, seventeen of Mark's tools are limited to the company owner and closed to shared collaborators, which governs permissions within the account rather than separation between customers.
Third Party Request and Subpoena Notice
If someone subpoenas the vendor for a firm’s data, does the firm hear about it first?
The privacy policy says personal information may be disclosed as required by law, including subpoenas and law enforcement or national security requests, and the Terms of Service say that for a disabled account no information is released outside LegalZoom absent a subpoena or court order. Neither commits to telling the customer first.
The Terms of Service let Northwest share data with law enforcement and require that law enforcement requests come as valid process sent to its registered agent address. Neither the Terms nor the privacy policy commits to telling the customer before information goes out, and no transparency report is published.
Primary Law Corpus Provenance
Where does the law in this product come from, and does the vendor have the right to use it?
The sources are identified as the vendor's own content, with no primary law named. The MCP catalog says document analysis uses an attorney-curated clause framework and knowledge search draws on LegalZoom articles and approved legal education; the Terms of Use say LegalZoom strives to keep its documents current but cannot guarantee it. The statutes and cases behind that content and any update cadence are not stated.
Mark draws on the customer's live account data, covering companies, filings, invoices, domains, email and phone service, together with Northwest's own expertise. No statute, state filing rule or other primary source is named behind its answers on state requirements, and no update cadence is published.
Good Law Verification
Does the product tell you when the authority it just cited has been overruled?
A citator would have nothing to check in the summaries and analyses the AI features produce. The AI features summarize and analyze documents and cite no legal authority; no good-law check is described.
Mark answers account and filing questions rather than citing cases, so a citator would have nothing to work on, and no step that keeps the state requirements it describes current is published.
Refusal and Uncertainty Behavior
What does the product do when the answer is not in the corpus?
Inaccuracy is acknowledged and human review absorbs part of the workload, but the AI itself has no described way of signaling what it cannot answer. Doc Assist says its summaries may be incomplete or inaccurate and points users to attorneys, and the release says about 30 percent of license research requests still go to human review, but no behavior for questions the AI cannot answer, and no confidence signal, is described.
Mark brings in a Corporate Guide when a customer asks for a person, and the Terms say AI output may contain errors or hallucinations. No behavior is described for a question Mark cannot answer from the account or from Northwest's guidance, and no confidence signal is shown.
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 kept by Damien Charlotin holds no entry naming LegalZoom or Doc Assist as the tool used. Doc Assist is LegalZoom's AI feature for working on legal documents.
The AI Hallucination Cases database kept by Damien Charlotin holds no entry naming Northwest Registered Agent or Mark. Mark works on business accounts and state filings rather than court filings.
Bar Guidance Alignment
Has the vendor engaged in public with the ethics opinions its buyers are bound by?
Professional responsibility is addressed in general terms without named guidance. The Terms set out that LegalZoom is not a law firm, is not a registered legal document assistant under California law, and define the experience standard for network attorneys; the footer names its subsidiary law firm. No ethics opinion, court AI order or bar guidance on AI is named on the surfaces read.
Professional responsibility is addressed through the statements that Northwest is not a law firm or fiduciary and gives no legal advice, with attorney work limited to trademark matters accepted by Law on Call. No ethics opinion, state rule on document preparation services or bar guidance on AI is named.
Billing and Fee Posture
Does the vendor address what happens to the bill when the work takes an hour instead of six?
The product sits outside a lawyer and client fee relationship. Small businesses and individuals buy forms, filings and the free AI tools for their own matters and represent themselves, under the Terms of Service. Attorney fees under the legal plans are governed separately and fall outside this assessment.
Business owners buy formation, registered agent service and Mark's help for their own companies and represent themselves, so no lawyer bills a client for the work. Northwest's price claims, such as no rise in the registered agent price in 20 years, concern the buyer's own cost.
Outside Counsel Guideline Readiness
Can a firm get this vendor through a client’s AI clause without a bespoke negotiation?
A customer asking which AI providers handle its documents would find the question unanswered by any list. The privacy policy names payment, shipping and identity-verification vendors as examples, but no subprocessor or AI model provider list is published and none is offered on request.
A business owner asking which providers handle its information would find no subprocessor list. Northwest says it performs nearly every service in house, and the Terms name Corporate Filings LLC as payment processor. The privacy policy binds service providers by contract, but no list of the providers that touch account data is published.
Court Disclosure Support
If a judge’s standing order requires an AI disclosure, can the product produce one?
Customers who file what they prepare get no guidance on disclosing AI use. Customers prepare documents they may file, such as divorce papers, but nothing addresses disclosing AI use to a court or recording which content AI produced.
Mark adds filings to the cart, requests documents and changes account settings once a customer approves, and nothing records which content the AI produced or offers a record an owner could use if a filing were questioned.
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.
- AI Governance and Bias Disclosure
- Security Certifications and Trust Center
- Ethical Walls and Matter Segregation
- Good Law Verification
- Refusal and Uncertainty Behavior
- Outside Counsel Guideline Readiness
- Court Disclosure Support
Product updates
The latest logged changes from each vendor, newest first, each linked to its source.
LegalZoom
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Product / capability
LegalZoom opened its AI Assistant to all business owners for free, including those who formed their business elsewhere and open a free account.
Source -
Integration / interoperability
LegalZoom launched a ChatGPT plugin aimed at attorneys.
Source
In summary
LegalZoom
LegalZoom is an online legal platform for small businesses and individuals, listed on Nasdaq and based in Mountain View, California. It sells business formation and compliance filings, registered agent service, trademark and copyright filings, legal forms, estate planning documents and attorney plans, and states that it is not a law firm. Its AI features include Doc Assist, a free document summarizer, a business name generator, a grant finder and AI research for business licenses. According to the AI Legal Index, it also offers 24 MCP tools that let assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude and Microsoft 365 Copilot form LLCs and book attorney reviews. LLC formation starts at $0 plus state fees, with Pro at $249.
Northwest Registered Agent
Northwest Registered Agent is a business formation and registered agent service based in Spokane, Washington, with no outside investors and more than 1,300 employees. It forms LLCs, corporations and nonprofits, acts as registered agent in every state, files annual reports and runs a trademark service with attorneys. Mark, its AI assistant in the client portal, answers from live account data and carries out tasks such as paying invoices, and the Northwest MCP server offers the same 114 tools to outside assistants. According to the AI Legal Index, Northwest runs its own LLMs in its own datacenter and caps its liability at the fees paid in the prior twelve months. An LLC costs $39 plus state fees with a year of registered agent service.
Questions buyers ask
LegalZoom vs Northwest Registered Agent: which is better for forming an LLC?
Both form an LLC and act as registered agent. LegalZoom's Basic package costs $0 plus state fees and Pro costs $249, inside a wider range that adds trademarks, legal forms, estate planning and attorney plans. Northwest charges $39 plus state fees and includes a year of registered agent service and its address on state filings, then charges $125 a year for registered agent service. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of November 10, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Which one gives access to a lawyer?
LegalZoom does, through attorney plans with independent attorneys and its subsidiary law firm, and its Premium package includes 30 days of attorney consultations. Northwest states that it is not a law firm. Its attorneys handle trademark applications through Law on Call, and Corporate Guides answer other questions by phone and email. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of November 10, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
How do their AI assistants differ?
LegalZoom's AI is a set of tools around its products: Doc Assist summarizes documents, AI research produces business license lists, and 24 MCP tools let outside assistants form an LLC or book an attorney review. Northwest's Mark works on the customer's own account, answering from live filing, invoice and domain data and taking actions such as paying invoices, and its MCP server offers the same 114 tools to Claude, ChatGPT and other assistants. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of November 10, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Do LegalZoom and Northwest train AI on customer data?
LegalZoom's Doc Assist FAQ says uploads may train its own models but not third party AI tools. Northwest says it does not train on customer chats or business data and runs its own models in its own datacenter. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of November 10, 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.
Two points to weigh. LegalZoom's Doc Assist FAQ says uploads may train its own models, while Northwest says it does not train on customer data. Neither publishes an independent security attestation, and both cap liability at fees paid, so neither stands behind AI output that turns out wrong. LegalZoom.com, Inc. is listed on Nasdaq, and Northwest has no outside investors. Neither vendor reviewed this page.