Legau vs Spellbook: how they compare in 2026
Legau and Spellbook both put AI drafting and review inside Microsoft Word. Spellbook sells to transactional lawyers and states more than 4,500 teams in over 80 countries, while Legau, founded in Lisbon, also covers research and translation in Word and Outlook. Spellbook's lead is its model supply chain. It names GPT-5 and Claude Opus as its models and states zero data retention with OpenAI and Anthropic. Its trust portal carries a subprocessor list, SOC 2 Type II and an EU AI Act opinion from CMS Law. Legau's counterweight is how it fits a firm. It publishes three tiers from $79 a month, connects by tier to iManage, NetDocuments and SharePoint, and hosts on Azure in the United States or the EU by client jurisdiction. Spellbook prices by team members on a license, with a seven day free trial.
Which one fits
Choose Legau if
- Your documents live in iManage or NetDocuments. Legau connects to SharePoint and OneDrive on its Starter tier and adds iManage, NetDocuments, Google Drive and Dropbox from Business upward, with document sync limits stated per tier, so drafting and research draw on the firm's own files.
- You want the model inside your own infrastructure. Legau's Advanced AI Layer add on runs a firm specific model on the firm's own infrastructure, with the firm owning the model, and its hosted product sits on Azure in the United States or the EU according to the client's jurisdiction.
- Your work goes beyond contracts. Legau covers research, planning, drafting, review and translation in Word and Outlook, draws on its own court decisions database, and lists twelve practice areas from M&A and capital markets to litigation, tax and employment.
Choose Spellbook if
- You need to know which models read your drafts. Spellbook names GPT-5 and Claude Opus, states zero data retention agreements with OpenAI and Anthropic under which request data exists only in memory, and publishes a subprocessor list with processing locations in Canada and the United States.
- Your procurement team wants attestations and an AI Act position. Spellbook's trust portal links SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA resources and business associate agreements, and carries an independent CMS Law opinion classifying its product as low risk under the EU AI Act.
- You want clauses benchmarked against the market. Spellbook's Compare checks a clause against thousands of similar agreements across more than 2,300 contract types and explains why differences matter, and its Associate agent works through multi document matters under your oversight.
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.
Generative AI drives all five product functions: research, planning, creation, review and translation. The vendor brands the underlying system Legau.AI and offers no conventional mode of the product alongside it. The clearest evidence is commercial rather than editorial: AI Assistant requests are the metered unit on every pricing tier, at 10, 50 and unlimited per user per month, so the machine learning is literally what the buyer is charged for.
The models are the product. Review, Draft, Ask, Compare and the Associate agent are all generative capabilities delivered through a Word add in that exists to carry them. The company pivoted its whole business to generative AI in 2022, rebranding from Rally to Spellbook. Remove the models and there is no product, only an empty add in.
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 documented at feature level. The product retrieves from a court decisions database, an enriched layer carrying similar decisions and mentions, a legal papers engine and the firm's own document management system. An Automatic Quoting feature places retrieved authority into the draft. No accuracy rate, hallucination rate, benchmark or evaluation is published on any located surface.
Ask can use selected iManage files and return citations to the team's own contracts. The legal data connection retrieves material from named open legal databases such as CanLII, CourtListener, Cornell Law, EUR Lex and regional legal information institutes, with links to the underlying authority; its page claims more than 1,000 databases while its tables list about 108. Their currency follows the source operator's updates. Spellbook's Humans Hallucinate Too study ran Review over 3,019 contracts filed with the SEC in a deliberately conservative mode, without a described human check of its findings. Spellbook publishes no reproducible accuracy evaluation for its own AI, no automatic subsequent treatment check and no abstention threshold. A citation makes an answer inspectable, but checking the quotation or legal proposition against it is still the reviewing lawyer's job.
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.
The vendor positions the product as assistance with the attorney retaining oversight of drafting, which is a general assurance of human review rather than a stated boundary. No named plan or mode carries a limit on what its output may be used for, and no review checkpoint is described in the product flow. A general assurance is the B shape.
Review proposes changes in Word for the lawyer to inspect and approve, either individually or in a group. Playbooks encode the team's instructions, while Associate takes on work across several files with user oversight. Proposed edits can carry the reviewer's identity when accepted, and citation links let the reviewer inspect supporting material. Autonomous Contract Management, generally available since 7 October 2026, applies routing rules that can auto approve contracts, such as those under $50,000 that pass every playbook rule, while flagged items go to a person and every AI edit appears as a tracked change. The terms place responsibility for reliance and verification with the customer. No universal threshold is stated at which Associate must stop or escalate an unsupported conclusion, and no route is published for reversing an approval the system made on its own.
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.
Three figures are published: 22.1 percent of time gained back per attorney on average, 91 percent of attorneys who used the product saved time, and 75 percent reporting more satisfaction at work. All three are attributed to attorneys who used Legau, with no sample size, measurement period or method published. Five law firm customers are displayed by logo, including PLMJ and Morais Leitao. The named customers carry no figures, and the figures carry no method.
Named customer accounts involve Dropbox, Panasonic, KMSC Law, Alturas Capital Partners and Elevare Law. Panasonic's account concerns saving three weeks while building an RFP process, while other testimonials describe drafting capacity and keeping work inside the legal team. Spellbook says more than 5,000 legal teams use it and claims 75 percent time saved on contract work without a method. These examples establish identifiable use rather than only a logo wall. A consistent dated measurement protocol, comparison baseline and workload definition do not accompany the range of savings claims, so the figures are specific customer accounts rather than a reproducible general result.
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.
The security page documents real architecture. Each customer has its own storage container, external access is restricted to Legau's compute infrastructure, access keys are rotated, and access runs on a need to know basis. The data page states that data is never sold or used beyond providing the service, and marketing surfaces state that client documents are never used to train any AI. Neither attorney client privilege nor work product appears anywhere on the located site, and no matter level segregation is described. This is confidentiality architecture without the two terms of art that attach a professional duty to it.
Spellbook's agreement expressly protects privileged information and work product and requires confidentiality for staff and service providers handling customer content. Its iManage integration preserves existing file permissions and ethical walls. Third party models cannot train on customer content and operate under zero retention commitments. Spellbook itself may use deidentified content for customer specific personalization and retain inputs and outputs temporarily for quality assurance, while the terms restrict those uses and access. These permissions are narrower than unrestricted cross customer training, but they are not an across the board ban on learning from client content. Application history also has no single stated in use retention deadline.
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.
No statement that the product supplies a tool rather than legal advice is published, no reference to ABA Formal Opinion 512 or to any bar or ethics guidance, and no jurisdiction limitation. The published terms of use disclaim accuracy of website content, which is a website disclaimer and not a professional responsibility posture. The audience is attorneys and legal departments throughout.
Output counts as information rather than formal legal advice under Spellbook's terms, which place verification and appropriate lawyer review with the customer. The product is directed to law firms and legal departments, with review controls inside Word and oversight of Associate's work across files. The agreement also warns that non English use can produce unsatisfactory results. That is a concrete language limitation, but not a tested jurisdictional coverage matrix or a map of which regulated services the software can provide. Human acceptance of a redline remains part of contract work, and an answer from a cited public source is not a substitute for checking its legal application.
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 governance owner, no pre release testing description, no evaluation practice and no statement on output variation across document types, jurisdictions or parties. Nothing located either way.
Spellbook's terms describe internal AI risk and prohibited use policies, staff education and regular reassessment of ethical and legal requirements. Its security material also cites a CMS Law opinion classifying the product under the EU AI Act and identifying applicable controls. These are concrete governance arrangements beyond a general promise to act responsibly. The product supports verification through citations and user approval of edits, but those controls are separate from evaluating a model before release. The framework names no internal owner, no reproducible release test set and no results on uneven behavior across populations or matter types.
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.
Substantive published practice. Encryption is stated in transit at TLS 1.2 or above with forward secrecy, and at rest. The security page also describes storage containers for each customer, rotating access keys, a zero trust firewall, SSO, and prevention of injection and cross site attacks, plus deletion and data portability on request. Three items are not published: a subprocessor list, an incident response practice, and any retention statement covering customer documents. Independent attestation is covered separately under Security Certifications and Trust Center.
OpenAI and Anthropic process Spellbook requests under zero retention and no training commitments. Spellbook's own terms permit quality assurance copies of inputs and outputs for up to 90 days, restricted to authorized staff, and self service abuse monitoring for up to 30 days unless an investigation or law requires longer. Microsoft identity integration lets organizations enforce their authentication policies, and iManage access preserves source permissions. The agreement covers confidentiality, security incidents and deletion or return of customer material, while the processor register identifies downstream services. Outside those secondary uses, Spellbook gives no single fixed period for how long application history is kept.
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.
The only published agreement is a website terms of use, which excludes liability to the fullest extent permissible for use of the website and says nothing about product output. The pricing page names the governing agreement for each tier as Legau Standard for the two lower tiers and Custom for enterprise, and no document under either name is published anywhere on the estate. So no indemnity, no cap, no carve out and no insurance position is reachable, and the agreement that would carry them is named but not published.
Specified intellectual property claims against the software are covered by an indemnity, alongside service warranties, while the accuracy of generated output and responsibility for customer reliance on it are disclaimed. The general limit is twelve months of fees, with exceptions including confidentiality, security, data incidents and indemnification duties. The agreement includes mutual protection for specified data incident claims and gross misconduct. Beta Features have separate warranty exclusions and a CAD 10,000 cap. These are concrete protections for platform and data risks, but they do not provide an accuracy warranty compensating a client when an accepted clause or legal assertion is wrong.
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.
Integration depth is published by tier. The product is a Word and Outlook add in rather than a separate application, so drafting, research, planning, review and translation all run in the client's existing environment, and every function has a stated Outlook variant. Document management support covers SharePoint, OneDrive, iManage, NetDocuments, Google Drive and Dropbox. The pricing table states which systems each tier reaches, with SharePoint and OneDrive at Starter and the full set from Business upward. A DMS Advanced Layer Sync is published with volume limits of 5,000 and 10,000 documents.
The iManage connection starts from Add from iManage in Ask or an Associate Project and authenticates the user's account once. The same connection then works in Word and Associate. Users select files through the attachment control or project file list; selected content becomes available as chat context or project references without a manual download. Answers cite the imported contracts, and precedents can guide review of incoming paper. Existing iManage permissions and ethical walls govern file access. The connection describes movement from iManage into Spellbook's working context; it does not promise automatic return of revised files to the source repository. Spellbook also runs in Google Docs, connects to Slack, OneDrive, Dropbox, SharePoint and Google Drive, and Autonomous Contract Management takes contracts in from Gmail, Outlook, Slack and Salesforce.
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.
Two deployment shapes are published with named regions. The hosted product runs on Microsoft Azure in East US or the EU, and the data page states that data is stored in the United States or Europe depending on the client's jurisdiction, so region follows the buyer rather than being an enterprise negotiation. The Advanced AI Layer add on runs inside the firm's own infrastructure with the firm owning the model. Published option plus named region plus a customer infrastructure path is the A shape.
Customer content is stored and processed in Canada and the United States, Spellbook states, with AWS as its primary cloud provider. Third party model requests are handled under zero retention agreements with OpenAI and Anthropic, while Spellbook itself has separate retention rights for quality and abuse monitoring. The Word add in and Associate connect to shared cloud services, including optional sources such as iManage. The public description identifies storage and processing countries but does not offer a per tier residency selector or a dedicated customer deployment. A source system's location therefore does not confine every later processing step to that same location.
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.
The security page is substantive and describes architecture at length, but it names no certification at all: no SOC 2, no ISO 27001, no penetration test summary, no trust portal and no audit of any kind, claimed or attested. There is also no self serve route to request a report. No independent attestation a buyer can obtain exists. The architecture the page does publish is covered under AI Safety and Data Stewardship.
Spellbook states that it is SOC 2 Type II compliant and provides a trust portal for reports, processor information and compliance resources. Its security program uses encryption, Microsoft identity controls and agreements governing model providers. The public security explanation also describes HIPAA support through business associate agreements where appropriate and a legal opinion on EU AI Act classification. These are different assurances with different scopes. The open product explanation leaves out the current SOC audit period, the auditor and the full service scope. The named SOC standard therefore supports a specific certification claim without treating every resource or regulatory statement as an equivalent independent security audit.
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.
No model is named, no model provider is named, and no subprocessor list is published. Legau.AI and Advanced AI Layer are product brand names rather than disclosure. The data processing agreement defines a sub subcontractor category and governs their appointment but publishes no list of who they are. A legal buyer cannot learn from any public surface whose model reads its drafts.
Language models come from OpenAI and Anthropic, under zero retention agreements that keep request and response content in memory for processing rather than persistent storage at those providers. Spellbook describes its models as GPT-5, Claude and other models it does not name, while older pages of its own still cite GPT-4o and GPT-4. AWS is the primary cloud provider, and storage and processing are described in Canada and the United States. The trust portal lists processors and records updates when suppliers change. Spellbook does not map models to features or give exact production versions, and a public processor update history is not an explicit commitment to notify every customer whenever a model version or deployment location changes within the same supplier.
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.
Three tiers carry published monthly rates of 79, 99 and 139 US dollars, with a full feature comparison matrix across research, creation, review, planning, translation and support. The unit of charge is published rather than implied: AI Assistant credits at 10, 50 and unlimited requests per user per month, documents segmented at 300 and 600, and DMS sync at 5,000 and 10,000 documents. SSO type, interface languages, support channel, onboarding format and reporting cadence are all stated by tier. Two add ons, the Advanced Layer and electronic signature, are request only and that is stated plainly. One qualifier: every tier reads From, and the page says pricing is tailored to setup complexity, adoption and organization size, so the published figure is a floor.
The number of team members on a license sets the price of the suite, which now lists Review, Draft, Ask, Benchmarks, Playbooks and Associate. Law firm and in house packages both include the Word add in and Associate, training and online support, with dedicated support for teams above ten. The in house offering includes a playbook build service, and academic institutions get free access. A seven day trial is available, with extended trials possible for larger organizations. Subscription amounts remain custom rather than a public per user rate. The terms of 17 September 2026 renew orders for 12 month terms and cap annual increases in subscription fees at 10 percent, and Spellbook may change the terms by posting them, effective after 30 days.
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.
Practice coverage is enumerated rather than claimed, across twelve areas. A transactional page covers corporate and M&A, commercial, banking and finance, real estate, capital markets and securities, and intellectual property. A non transactional page covers litigation, tax, regulatory and compliance, labor and employment, antitrust and competition, and government and public. The buyer is stated as a law firm or legal department. Firm size is not addressed: no band is stated anywhere, and the three pricing tiers are the only indication of whether this is sold to solos, midsize firms or the large firms whose logos appear on the homepage.
Law firm and in house packages are sold separately, and the principal tools center on transactional drafting, review, negotiation and questions about agreements. Associate extends work across several files, iManage access allows firms to use existing contract precedents, and Autonomous Contract Management, generally available since October 2026, handles routine incoming contracts for in house teams. Industry material covers energy, healthcare, finance, technology, manufacturing and consumer businesses, and academic institutions get free access. The legal data connection adds government and court sources across many regions, though breadth of sources is a different matter from tested competence in every practice. The terms warn about non English results. Spellbook does not list the jurisdictions or specialized legal tasks it leaves unsupported.
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?
Vendor surfaces state plainly that customer documents, templates and client data are not used to train any AI, and the AI legal assistant page repeats the commitment for the Advanced AI Layer, adding that the firm owns its own model. No matching term is located in the published data processing agreement, which governs personal data processing and does not address training in either direction. The commitment names the thing, so this is not silence, but it lives in policy rather than in an agreement a client could hold the firm to.
The terms prohibit third party models from retaining or training on customer content. Spellbook itself may process deidentified customer material to improve that customer's features and calibrate personalized systems, without using that personalization for other customers. It can also evaluate prompt and system improvements through limited quality monitoring. These own service improvement permissions are distinct from the provider prohibition and do not require a separate opt in in the standard agreement.
Prompt and Output Retention
How long does the product keep what a lawyer typed, and can that be set to zero?
The data processing agreement bounds storage of personal data to the life of the contract. That clause does not reach prompts and drafts, because the vendor defines its personal data footprint narrowly as the name, title and email of users, while uploaded documents are handled separately as Customer Assets on the security page. No located material states how long prompts, outputs or uploaded documents persist, or whether a customer can set that period to zero.
Model providers handle request and response content in memory under zero retention agreements. Spellbook may keep quality assurance inputs and outputs for up to 90 days, and self service abuse monitoring data for up to 30 days, with investigation and legal exceptions. Those are specific secondary uses rather than a stated ordinary lifetime for all application history. Deletion and return provisions are a different mechanism from a configurable zero history setting.
Ethical Walls and Matter Segregation
Does retrieval respect the firm’s ethical walls, or can the model read across them?
Per customer storage containers separate one firm from another, which is tenancy rather than an ethical wall. Nothing located addresses walls or matter level segregation inside a firm, and no material states whether retrieval inherits document management system permissions at query time. The question is live for this product specifically, because it indexes the firm's own document management system and answers out of it.
The iManage integration applies existing iManage permissions and ethical walls to file access inside Spellbook. A user authenticates the source account once, then selects permitted files for Ask in Word, Ask in Associate or an Associate Project. Selected material becomes context for answers and review. Spellbook describes this protection specifically for the iManage connection and does not extend the claim to permission inheritance on the other optional storage connections.
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 states that personal data may be disclosed to third parties to comply with applicable law or legal process, and gives responding to a subpoena as its worked example. No commitment to notify the customer is located, and no discretion over notice is reserved either way. The vendor has told the customer that data can leave and has said nothing about whether the firm hears of it. No transparency report is published.
Section 4.3(d) of Spellbook's terms, updated 17 September 2026, requires prompt notice of a legal or government demand for customer data and reasonable cooperation with efforts to obtain a protective order or contest disclosure. The confidentiality provisions also address compelled disclosure and protection of privileged material. These contractual steps give the customer an opportunity to respond to a demand. Spellbook does not publish a report counting government requests and their outcomes.
Primary Law Corpus Provenance
Where does the law in this product come from, and does the vendor have the right to use it?
The product is described as drawing on a court decisions database, an enriched court decisions layer and a legal papers engine, plus knowledge banks of court decisions and doctrine. No jurisdiction, court, publisher or license basis is identified for any of it, and no update cadence is stated. The only rights related phrase located is a carve out on the pricing page describing the legal papers engine as excluding publishers. Checked 15 September 2026 across the marketing estate and the four footer legal documents.
The legal data connection names its sources, including CanLII, Cornell Law, CourtListener, EUR Lex, BAILII and national government registers. Spellbook retrieves material directly from each source of record and follows its update cadence. The same workflow can use the customer's own contracts and iManage precedents. The named source list makes jurisdiction coverage inspectable, but does not state an individual license or public domain basis for every external collection or its separate market benchmark data.
Good Law Verification
Does the product tell you when the authority it just cited has been overruled?
The enriched court decisions layer surfaces similar decisions, mentions and related legal papers, which is a citation network rather than a treatment signal. No located material states whether authority the product returns is checked for subsequent history, and no citator is named. Checked 15 September 2026 across the marketing estate and the footer legal documents.
Citations to public case law, statutes and registers come back from the legal data feature, with currency tied to the operator of each source. Ask, Draft and Review can use that authority within the contract workflow. The feature does not describe a licensed citator or a method for checking subsequent judicial treatment of a case. A current link to the underlying decision is therefore separate from a signal that its legal proposition remains reliable.
Refusal and Uncertainty Behavior
What does the product do when the answer is not in the corpus?
No located material describes what the product does when it cannot ground an answer. No abstention path is documented, no confidence or grounding score is exposed in published material, and no evaluation is published. Checked 15 September 2026 across the marketing estate and the footer legal documents.
Source citations and selected precedent files provide context for Spellbook's answers and proposed redlines. A lawyer can inspect that material and accept or reject suggested changes. The product does not describe an automatic no answer response, an exposed confidence threshold or a required escalation when available material cannot support a conclusion. A contractual warning about unreliable output assigns verification to the user rather than defining an abstention mechanism.
Fabricated Citation Record
Does a public court record exist addressing fabricated or hallucinated legal citations in output from this product?
No court order, opinion or disciplinary record addressing fabricated or hallucinated legal citations in output from this product was located as of 15 September 2026. The tracker searched was the AI Hallucination Cases database maintained by Damien Charlotin, alongside a general search of the public record. This describes the public record on that one subject as of that date, not the product.
Youssian v Village of Kings Point, 2026 NY Slip Op 26150, Supreme Court of New York, Nassau County, September 9, 2026, addresses counsel's fabricated quotations and misrepresented holdings. The opinion recounts counsel accepting Spellbook AI changes without repeating a citation check. It sanctions counsel $5,000, awards $10,000 in fees and strikes both petitions. The findings concern the lawyer's verification and response to the errors; the product attribution appears in counsel's explanation.
Bar Guidance Alignment
Has the vendor engaged in public with the ethics opinions its buyers are bound by?
No located public material engages with bar or ethics guidance. ABA Formal Opinion 512 is not referenced, no state or national bar opinion is named, and no risk committee facing material is published. Checked 15 September 2026 across the marketing estate, both trust pages and the four footer legal documents.
Youssian v Village of Kings Point, 2026 NY Slip Op 26150, Supreme Court of New York, Nassau County, September 9, 2026, addresses counsel's fabricated quotations and misrepresented holdings. The opinion recounts counsel accepting Spellbook AI changes without repeating a citation check. It sanctions counsel $5,000, awards $10,000 in fees and strikes both petitions. Damien Charlotin's AI Hallucination Cases database lists the case with Spellbook AI as the tool, and it is the only case naming Spellbook among the database's 2,262 entries.
The findings concern the lawyer's verification and response to the errors; the product attribution appears in counsel's explanation.
Billing and Fee Posture
Does the vendor address what happens to the bill when the work takes an hour instead of six?
The vendor markets time savings to the buyer, publishing 22.1 percent of time gained back per attorney and 91 percent of attorneys saving time, and the product sits inside a fee relationship between a law firm and its clients where compressed hours change the invoice. No located material addresses billing treatment, fee disclosure, or what a firm should tell a client about AI assisted work. The savings claim is published and the client side of it is not.
The law firm suite is pitched as a way to improve profitability and the in house suite as a way to retain more work internally. Customer stories describe time savings, including Panasonic's RFP process. The product's per user subscription is separate from a lawyer's charges to clients. A matter level invoice record of AI assisted time or instructions for disclosing those savings on a client's bill are not described in the current pricing offer.
Outside Counsel Guideline Readiness
Can a firm get this vendor through a client’s AI clause without a bespoke negotiation?
No subprocessor list, no model provider list and no client facing disclosure material located. The data processing agreement defines a sub subcontractor category and governs how they are appointed, but publishes no list of who they are, so a firm facing an AI clause in a client's outside counsel guidelines has nothing here it can forward. Checked 15 September 2026.
Spellbook identifies OpenAI and Anthropic, provides a processor register and explains provider retention and training restrictions. Its security resources address SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA support and an EU AI Act opinion, while the agreement covers privileged information and legal demand notice. Those materials support a firm's client review. They do not form a single client consent pack, and the firm's account must distinguish provider restrictions from Spellbook's own personalization and monitoring permissions.
Court Disclosure Support
If a judge’s standing order requires an AI disclosure, can the product produce one?
No located material addresses court disclosure obligations, judicial standing orders or verification certification, and no export covering model used, sources retrieved and human verification is described. Checked 15 September 2026 across the marketing estate and the footer legal documents.
Word review retains proposed tracked edits, and answers based on contracts or public legal data include source citations. Admin audit logs, added in September 2026, record administrative changes rather than where an AI output came from. Those features preserve portions of the review process and allow a lawyer to check supporting material. An export combining exact model version, retrieved sources and human verification for each generated passage is not described.
The available editing and citation records are therefore partial support for an account of AI use rather than a complete court certification package.
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
- Refusal and Uncertainty Behavior
In summary
Legau
Legau is a legal drafting platform founded in Lisbon in 2021 by attorneys and launched in the United States in 2024. It runs inside Microsoft Word and Outlook for research, planning, drafting, review and translation across all document types. It connects to SharePoint, OneDrive, iManage, NetDocuments, Google Drive and Dropbox, and retrieves from its own court decisions database and the firm's files. According to the AI Legal Index, Legau publishes three tiers from $79 a month and hosts on Azure in the United States or the EU by client jurisdiction. It shows PLMJ and Morais Leitao among its customers.
Spellbook
Spellbook, founded in 2018 in St John's, Newfoundland and renamed from Rally in 2022, is an AI contract review and drafting tool for transactional lawyers. It runs as a Word add in and in Google Docs, with Review, Draft, Playbooks, Ask, Compare and a multi document Associate agent. According to the AI Legal Index, Spellbook names GPT-5 and Claude Opus, states zero data retention with OpenAI and Anthropic, and publishes a trust portal with SOC 2 Type II. It states more than 4,500 teams in over 80 countries. It prices by the number of team members on a license, with a seven day free trial.
Questions buyers ask
Legau vs Spellbook: which is better for drafting in Word?
Both put AI drafting and review inside Microsoft Word. Spellbook names its models and providers and holds SOC 2 Type II. Legau fits a firm's systems, with document management connectors by tier, a choice of US or EU hosting and published prices. Firms running iManage or NetDocuments will find more that fits in Legau. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of September 25, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Which AI models does Spellbook use?
Spellbook's home page names GPT-5 and Claude Opus, and its security pages name OpenAI and Anthropic as providers with zero data retention agreements, under which request data exists only in memory. Its trust portal publishes a subprocessor list with processing in Canada and the United States. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of September 25, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
How much do Legau and Spellbook cost?
Legau publishes three tiers from $79, $99 and $139 a month, with AI requests, document volumes and document management sync limits stated per tier; each figure is a floor tailored to the firm. Spellbook prices by the number of team members on a license, with two tiers for law firms and in house teams, and offers a seven day free trial. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of September 25, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Does Legau work with iManage and NetDocuments?
Yes, from its Business tier. Legau's pricing table lists SharePoint and OneDrive at Starter and adds iManage, NetDocuments, Google Drive and Dropbox from Business upward, with document sync limits of 5,000 and 10,000. Spellbook names Word, Google Docs, email, Slack and Salesforce as integration surfaces. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of September 25, 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.
Three points to weigh. Legau's pricing names its governing agreements, Legau Standard and a custom enterprise agreement, but neither is published. So nothing on this page settles Legau's liability and professional responsibility positions. A named partner quoted on Spellbook's site says the product helps him bill an extra hour a day, and nothing on its site addresses how AI assisted work is billed. Legau's court decisions database names no jurisdiction or publisher. Neither vendor reviewed this page.