Plexus vs Xakia: how they compare in 2026
Plexus and Xakia are both Melbourne based platforms for in house legal teams, covering intake and triage, matters, contracts and reporting. Xakia lists its prices, from $100 per user a month on Advance to $230 on All In, with month to month plans, a 14 day trial and AI as a paid add on below Enterprise. Its AI addendum puts the advice line, supervision by legal practitioners and a bar on keeping inputs and outputs into the contract. Plexus quotes prices per Professional User license and builds AI into more of the workflow. Each new contract gets an automatic review, Plexus Counsel works across up to ten documents and Marketing Wizard checks Australian advertising law. Xakia adds spend and budget management with a free portal for outside counsel, and Plexus adds marketing and promotion compliance. Both publish customer terms with a liability cap, a data processing addendum and a subprocessor list. Plexus names OpenAI, while Xakia's addendum refers to third party AI tools without naming them.
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.
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.
Xakia sells AI as an add on for its Advance and Professional plans, includes it with usage caps in Enterprise and includes it without caps in All In. Customers on the lower plans can run the product without AI. The core is matter and task management, intake and triage, contracts, spend and budgets, documents, entities and reporting, all workflow and record keeping with no model behind them. The AI features are contract review and redlining in Word against the customer's playbook, contract summaries and key terms extraction. Smart Search turns a plain English request into a query the user can edit and save. Xakia's AI page also describes invoice review against billing guidelines, which the plan comparison lists as coming soon. An MCP server with connectors to Claude and Copilot is listed as coming soon for All In. The AI page makes every AI feature opt in, and the FAQ describes AI as a set of features Xakia is still expanding.
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 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.
Xakia's AI points back to the customer's own documents. Key terms extraction returns each term with a confidence score, the clause it came from and the exact text it relied on. A user reviews each value, corrects it and clicks Apply before anything reaches the contract repository. Contract review marks up a third party contract in Word against the customer's chosen playbook, governing law, market practice and basic drafting standards, at a Pragmatic, Balanced or Strict setting. It flags each deviation with a suggested redline for the lawyer to review. Smart Search shows the query it built from a plain English request, which the user can edit and save. The AI addendum says output may not be accurate or up to date and must be reviewed by a lawyer. The FAQ commits to expanding AI without compromising accuracy, and Xakia gives no accuracy figure, error rate or test results.
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.
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.
People make every key decision in Xakia. Legal teams route and tag intake requests, set up matters from templates and assign tasks, and the Enterprise plan adds intake workflows and contract approval and signing workflows that the legal team configures. The AI features work on documents a user has open, offering redlines, summaries and extracted terms rather than acting on their own. The AI addendum requires a lawyer's review of output and bars automated decisions with legal or similarly significant effects on individuals without human review. Xakia describes no agent that acts unattended, no threshold at which the AI stops or hands work to a person, and no remedy when an output is wrong.
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.
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.
Xakia names its customers and the people it quotes. Case studies cover Coca-Cola Europacific Partners, Medibank, Škoda Auto, Cancer Council Queensland, Healthscope, Axiom Medical, Movember, Syneos Health and JERA. At Coca-Cola Europacific Partners, the Australian legal team replaced paper forms compiled monthly into a spreadsheet, whose reports could run up to two months behind, with reporting that is current on any day. Medibank's legal department of about 25 people deployed Xakia with NetDocuments in a matter of weeks, according to senior legal counsel Kerryn Saric. Testimonials name the general counsel of BlueScope Buildings and Kiwi Property and staff at Tabcorp and the City of Murfreesboro. Chief legal officer Chuck Kable says Xakia has saved him hundreds of hours. The case studies carry no publication date, and none attaches a measured figure to an AI feature.
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.
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.
Xakia controls access with role based permissions at user, team or matter level, sensitive matters can be restricted to named individuals, and outside counsel see only what the customer shares through Xakia Connect. Single sign on runs through the customer's identity provider. The AI addendum bars Xakia and its third party AI tools from training any model on inputs or outputs, processes inputs transiently and keeps no inputs or outputs once output is delivered. It also lets Xakia train its AI features on anonymized data and statistics derived from inputs. Data and uploaded documents are encrypted in use, in transit and at rest, under ISO 27001:2022 and SOC 2 Type 2 certification. The terms and the addendum treat customer data as confidential without separate treatment of privilege or work product.
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 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.
Section 5.3 of Xakia's AI addendum, effective 1 February 2026, states that AI output is general information and does not constitute legal advice. The AI features are not a substitute for legal or professional skill, judgment and experience. They must be used only by or under the direct supervision of legal practitioners in line with applicable professional conduct rules. Users must validate or ignore notifications using their own professional judgment, because output may not be accurate or up to date. Section 5.4 requires a lawyer to review output as appropriate for the use case. Section 3.2(a) bars automated decisions with legal or similarly significant effects on individuals without proper human review in line with professional ethics rules. The buyer is an in house legal team. No specific bar guidance is 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 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.
Xakia's AI controls sit in the features and the contract rather than in a governance framework. Its AI page makes every feature opt in, so the customer decides what its team uses and when, and gives each feature a human checkpoint so nothing is applied without a user's sign off. The AI addendum bars automated decisions with legal or similarly significant effects on individuals without proper human review, and bars uses that are discriminatory or bias inducing. It also requires a lawyer to review output. The FAQ says Xakia expands its AI with a focus on saving time without compromising accuracy or security. Xakia sets out no AI principles, owner of AI governance, testing before release or bias findings, holds no ISO/IEC 42001 certification, and its security page covers information security.
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.
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.
Xakia publishes the terms that govern data handling. Its Terms of Service keep subscriber data for 30 days after termination, during which the subscriber can request a copy, and then delete it permanently. The AI addendum says inputs are processed transiently and that Xakia keeps no inputs or outputs once the output is delivered. The data processing addendum commits Xakia to notify the subscriber of a security breach involving its personal data without undue delay, with the information needed for its own reporting duties. The trust center lists subprocessors in effect since 1 April 2024, including Microsoft for hosting, HubSpot, Intercom, Stripe, Twilio and Xero, each with its country and purpose, and keeps earlier lists. Data and uploaded documents are encrypted in use, in transit and at rest, data and access logs are backed up, and role based permissions reach down to matter level with single sign on. Annual third party penetration tests and continuous vulnerability scanning support the ISO 27001:2022 and SOC 2 Type 2 certifications.
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.
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.
Xakia publishes the Terms of Service for its platform, effective 1 October 2025, and section 5.5 of its AI addendum applies their warranty disclaimers and liability limits to the AI features. Each party's liability is capped at the amounts paid or payable in the 12 months before the first incident. Xakia's liability for breaching its data security or confidentiality obligations, or any data processing addendum, rises to three times that cap. Indirect, consequential and lost profit damages are excluded. Xakia defends the subscriber and its users against third party claims that the platform, used as authorized, infringes intellectual property. Trials and betas carry no warranty or indemnity, and Xakia's liability for them is capped at $1,000. The AI addendum says output may not be accurate or up to date and must be reviewed by a lawyer, and Xakia gives no indemnity specific to AI output.
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.
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.
Xakia's pricing page lists its integrations by plan. Every plan includes Outlook, Word, SharePoint, Gmail and Microsoft Teams integrations, API access, and single sign on through Entra, Okta, SCIM or ADFS. Professional and above add iManage and NetDocuments integrations and connections to Brightflag, DocuSign, Ironclad and Josef. Slack and Salesforce appear on the higher plans, with Salesforce at extra cost. Xakia offers to keep documents in the customer's own SharePoint rather than migrating them, and the API carries no charge. The pages name each connection without saying what data moves in which direction or what an administrator configures. An MCP server with connectors to Claude and Copilot is listed as coming soon for All In.
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.
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.
Xakia runs on Microsoft Azure, and customers choose where data is stored in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom or the United States, with a Middle East location listed as coming soon. Different users in one account can have different data locations. European and UK customers can keep data on Azure servers in the United Kingdom or the Netherlands, and the Terms of Service, effective 1 October 2025, are built around the data location the subscriber selects. Section 1.4 of the AI addendum says AI processing runs where the third party AI tools are available and may differ from the selected location, with the processing location shown in the subscriber's account. Separate privacy policies cover Australia, the United States, Europe and Canada. Whether customers share infrastructure is not 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.
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.
Xakia states certification to ISO/IEC 27001:2022, SOC 2 Type 2 and HIPAA compliance on its security page, FAQ and pricing page, with regular independent audits of its applications, systems and networks. Its trust center shows compliance monitoring and controls and offers the ISO 27001:2022 certificate, a penetration test attestation and the SOC 2 Type 2 report on request. The data processing agreement and current and past subprocessor lists sit beside them. Third party experts test the application and infrastructure once a year, and third party tools scan the platform for vulnerabilities continuously. The platform is hosted on Microsoft Azure in Tier III facilities certified to ISO 27001:2022, SOC 2, PCI DSS, HIPAA and FedRAMP, with Australia's IRAP and the UK's G Cloud among the regional standards. The open pages name no auditing firm, audit period or report date.
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.
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.
Xakia's AI addendum refers to third party AI tools, defined as the third party language models and AI technology behind its AI features, without naming any of them. It says Xakia does not control their operation or continued availability, and that their processing location may differ from the subscriber's data location and is shown in the subscriber's account. Section 6 says any flow down terms the providers require are displayed at trust.xakiatech.com, and section 8.3 gives at least thirty days' notice of changes to the addendum. The subprocessor list in Xakia's trust center names Microsoft and business systems such as HubSpot and Stripe but no AI model provider. Neither the third party AI tools nor Xakia may train models on customer inputs or outputs.
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.
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.
Xakia's pricing page lists four plans priced per user per month, with Advance at $100, Professional at $125, Enterprise at $155 and All In at $230. A currency selector shows prices in Australian dollars, United States dollars, euros or pounds. Plans run month to month with no lock in, and annual billing takes up to 10 percent off. AI access adds $50 per user a month on Advance and $30 on Professional, priced in United States dollars with usage caps, and is included with caps on Enterprise and without caps on All In. Onboarding is a separate one off fee, with light and full options covering data migration, best practice guidance and training, and its amount is quoted rather than shown. A free 14 day trial needs no payment card. Internal requesters, outside counsel on the Connect portal and invoice volume carry no charge, and Xakia takes no percentage of invoice value, which it calls a clip of the ticket. A stakeholder license gives non legal users access to contracts and entity management at a flat annual rate.
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.
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.
Xakia targets in house legal teams of roughly 2 to 200 people, a range it repeats on its pricing page. The platform can be configured in English, Japanese, Spanish, French, Danish, Dutch and Brazilian Portuguese, and the spend module supports all currencies. Xakia has offices in Melbourne, Kansas City and London and says it has many hundreds of clients worldwide. Scope is stated by module, covering matters, intake, contracts, spend, documents, entities, disputes and reporting, with a stakeholder license for non legal users. Customers store data in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom or the United States and can set different data locations for different users. Industry segments and practice areas are not described.
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?
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.
Xakia's AI addendum bars training on customer content and permits training on anonymized data derived from it. The addendum, effective 1 February 2026, forms part of the Terms of Service. Section 2.4 says neither Xakia nor its third party AI tools will train any AI model on inputs or outputs, and that using them to improve service features is not training. Section 2.5 lets Xakia collect derived data, defined as anonymous data and statistics derived from inputs.
Xakia may use that data for benchmarking, reports and training its AI features or AI models, and discloses it outside Xakia only in anonymized, aggregated form. Section 1.3 lets a customer opt out of the AI features in its account, and the addendum offers no separate opt out from derived data. Xakia does not name the third party AI tools behind the features, and their processing may run outside the customer's selected data location, as shown in the customer's account.
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. 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.
Section 2.8 of Xakia's AI addendum sets the retention period for AI prompts and outputs at zero. Because the AI features process data ephemerally, Xakia does not retain inputs or outputs after the output is delivered. Inputs are processed transiently and not stored, and the customer is responsible for capturing anything it needs to keep. Xakia fixes the period rather than letting the customer configure it. It governs the AI features rather than matter data held in the platform, which the Terms of Service keep for 30 days after termination before permanent deletion.
Extracted key terms enter the contract repository only when a user clicks Apply, and then follow the matter data's retention.
Ethical Walls and Matter Segregation
Does retrieval respect the firm’s ethical walls, or can the model read across them?
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.
Role based permissions control access by user, team or matter, Xakia says sensitive matters can be restricted to specific people, and outside counsel see only what the customer chooses to share through the Connect portal. Single sign on through the customer's own identity provider handles authentication. The product runs its own permission structure rather than applying a document management system's access model at query time, and Xakia does not say whether the AI features apply those permissions when they read documents.
Third Party Request and Subpoena Notice
If someone subpoenas the vendor for a firm’s data, does the firm hear about it first?
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.
Xakia's data processing addendum commits it to inform the subscriber promptly of any third party request made directly to Xakia about its processing of the subscriber's personal data, with details of the request. The commitment applies to the extent the law permits. Third party requests include those from a regulatory authority. Xakia will not respond to such a request without prior notice to the subscriber and a chance to object, except where the law requires it or to confirm that the request relates to that subscriber. The commitment covers personal data under the addendum, and Xakia issues no transparency report.
Primary Law Corpus Provenance
Where does the law in this product come from, and does the vendor have the right to use it?
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.
Xakia holds no legal content collection. Its AI features work on the customer's own contracts, documents and invoices in the platform, so the material and its provenance are the customer's. Contract review applies the customer's own playbook and also checks a contract against governing law, market practice and basic drafting standards, without naming where that knowledge comes from. Xakia supplies no licensed legal content and states no license basis or update cadence for the knowledge its model applies.
Good Law Verification
Does the product tell you when the authority it just cited has been overruled?
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.
Xakia manages an in house team's matters, contracts and spend rather than case law, so a citator sits outside the product. Its AI reviews and summarizes the customer's own contracts and extracts key terms, and Smart Search works across the customer's own documents. Keeping contract standards in step with changes in law is the legal team's work, and the AI addendum makes users responsible for checking that output is accurate and up to date.
Refusal and Uncertainty Behavior
What does the product do when the answer is not in the corpus?
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.
Xakia's key terms extraction returns each value with a confidence score, the clause it came from and the exact text it relied on. A user reviews and corrects each value before clicking Apply, so nothing reaches the contract repository unchecked. Contract review flags deviations from the playbook for a lawyer to decide, and Smart Search shows the query it built so a user can check and correct it. Xakia describes no path for declining a request when a document holds no answer, such as a key term the contract does not contain.
The AI addendum tells users to validate or ignore output using their own professional judgment, because it may not be accurate or up to date.
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 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.
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 Xakia. Xakia's AI produces contract redlines, summaries and extracted terms from the customer's own documents rather than court filings.
Bar Guidance Alignment
Has the vendor engaged in public with the ethics opinions its buyers are bound by?
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.
Xakia's AI addendum refers to professional duties in general terms. It requires the AI features to be used only by or under the direct supervision of legal practitioners in accordance with applicable professional conduct rules. It also bars automated decisions with legal or similarly significant effects on individuals without proper human review in compliance with applicable professional ethics, guidelines and rules.
Neither the addendum nor Xakia's site names a bar opinion, such as ABA Formal Opinion 512, or guidance from the Law Council of Australia or a state law society, in Xakia's home market. Xakia's in house hub covers evaluating matter management software and legal operations practice.
Billing and Fee Posture
Does the vendor address what happens to the bill when the work takes an hour instead of six?
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.
Xakia's spend module is the payer's record of outside counsel fees. Outside firms accept work, update matter details and submit invoices through the Connect portal, which they use at no charge, and the legal team tracks spend against matter budgets in any currency. Xakia sets no limits on the number of firms, invoices or spend managed. It takes no percentage of invoices, which it calls a clip of the ticket, so its revenue does not grow with a customer's legal spend.
Budget tracking compares forecasts with spend to reduce overspend. AI invoice review is listed in the plan comparison as coming soon. How firms bill AI assisted work is left to the customer's own billing terms.
Outside Counsel Guideline Readiness
Can a firm get this vendor through a client’s AI clause without a bespoke negotiation?
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.
Xakia's trust center publishes its subprocessor list, in effect since 1 April 2024, with each provider's country and purpose, including ChurnZero, HubSpot, Intercom, Microsoft, Stripe, Twilio and Xero, and keeps the earlier lists. The data processing agreement is downloadable there, and the ISO 27001:2022 certificate, a penetration test attestation and the SOC 2 Type 2 report are available on request. The AI addendum refers to third party AI tools without naming them.
No AI model provider appears on the subprocessor list, so Xakia's documents leave the provider behind the AI features unnamed for a client who asks. Restriction by matter and the limited outside counsel view in Connect control who sees client material.
Court Disclosure Support
If a judge’s standing order requires an AI disclosure, can the product produce one?
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.
Xakia keeps parts of the record a court or client might ask for. Extracted key terms carry the clause they came from and the exact text relied on, and reach the contract repository only after a user reviews them and clicks Apply. Xakia's AI page says each decision a user takes on an invoice review finding lands in the audit trail. The platform also records matter activity, intake routing and spend against each matter.
No export ties an AI output to the model used, and no model is named. Xakia's output is internal records, contracts and reporting rather than court filings, so a judicial order on AI disclosure is less likely to reach it.
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
- Good Law Verification
Which one fits
Choose Plexus if
- You want AI working 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, summarizes key terms and fills intake fields from uploaded documents. Its redline cards in Word change nothing until a user accepts them and then apply as tracked changes.
- Your legal team also clears marketing and promotions. Marketing Wizard rates marketing assets high, medium or low risk against more than 230 Australian laws and codes and sends high risk items to legal. Promotion Wizard produces trade promotion terms reviewed by Plexus lawyers, and Lion reports approvals up to 90 percent faster.
- You want the model provider named. Plexus names OpenAI's enterprise models on its security and AI pages and in the subprocessor annex of its Subscription Terms, and runs contract review on Amazon Bedrock in Australia. Xakia's AI addendum refers to third party AI tools and shows their processing location inside the customer's account.
Choose Xakia if
- You want to see the price and start small. Xakia lists Advance, Professional, Enterprise and All In at $100, $125, $155 and $230 per user a month, month to month or annual at up to 10 percent off. A 14 day trial needs no payment card. AI adds $50 a user a month on Advance and $30 on Professional.
- You want AI limits written into the contract. Xakia's AI addendum, effective February 2026, states that AI output is general information rather than legal advice and must be used by or under the direct supervision of legal practitioners. It bars automated decisions with legal effect without human review, and inputs and outputs are not kept once delivered.
- You pay outside counsel through the same system and want a choice of data location. Firms use the Connect portal at no charge, with no percentage taken on invoice value, and the spend module supports all currencies. Customers store data in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom or the United States.
In summary
Plexus
Plexus is a legal operations platform for in house legal teams, with guided intake that routes matters, contracts drafted, approved and signed in one flow, and marketing and promotion compliance. Its AI reviews the first version of each new contract against precedents, fills intake fields, suggests redlines in Word and answers questions through Plexus Counsel. The AI runs on OpenAI's enterprise models, with contract review on Amazon Bedrock in Australia. Prices are quoted per Professional User license, and ENGIE Australia, Caidya and Lion report figures in case studies.
Xakia
Xakia, founded in 2016 and headquartered in Melbourne, is a matter management and legal operations platform for in house legal teams of roughly 2 to 200. It covers matters, intake and triage, contracts, spend and budgets, documents, entities and reporting, with the Connect portal for outside counsel. Its AI reviews and redlines contracts, summarizes them, extracts key terms and powers Smart Search, with AI invoice review listed as coming soon. Plans run from $100 to $230 per user a month, customers choose one of five data locations on Microsoft Azure, and its AI addendum states that inputs and outputs are not kept.
Questions buyers ask
Plexus vs Xakia: which is better for a small in house team?
Xakia suits a team of roughly 2 to 200 that wants listed prices, month to month plans and AI terms written into its contract, with spend management and a free portal for outside counsel. Plexus suits a team that wants AI across contract review and intake, marketing and promotion compliance, and contracts approved and signed in one flow, at a quoted price. Both are built in Melbourne for in house legal teams, and both publish customer terms with a data processing addendum. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of October 9, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Do Plexus and Xakia train AI on customer data?
Xakia's AI addendum states that neither Xakia nor its third party AI tools will train any model on inputs or outputs. It permits training the AI features on derived data, defined as anonymous data and statistics drawn from inputs, disclosed externally only when deidentified and aggregated. Plexus says customer data never trains public or shared models, in policy pages rather than its Subscription Terms, and keeps each customer in its own databases and vector stores. 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 keeps AI prompts and outputs?
Xakia's AI addendum says inputs are processed transiently and that inputs and outputs are not kept after the output is delivered, so the customer captures anything it needs. Plexus states no retention period for prompts or outputs. Files uploaded to a Counsel thread stay available for the life of the thread, and accepted AI summaries, comments and redlines become part of the document record. Plexus backups allow recovery to any point in the previous seven days. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of October 9, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
How much do Plexus and Xakia cost?
Xakia's pricing page lists Advance at $100, Professional at $125, Enterprise at $155 and All In at $230 per user a month. AI adds $50 on Advance and $30 on Professional, is included with usage caps on Enterprise and has no caps on All In, and onboarding is a separate fee. Plexus quotes prices per Professional User license and raises fees by 7 percent plus CPI each year. Its free trial needs no payment card and includes Plexus Counsel and Marketing Wizard. 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 Plexus and Xakia both leave unpublished?
Neither publishes an AI governance framework, an accuracy rate for its AI or bar guidance naming a specific opinion, and neither offers an indemnity covering AI output. Neither names the model version behind each feature or commits to notice before a model changes, and neither issues a transparency report on government requests. Both keep their security reports behind a request, Plexus through a portal and Xakia through its trust center. 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.
Xakia's AI addendum bars Xakia and its AI providers from training on inputs and outputs and permits Xakia to train its AI features on anonymized data derived from inputs. Plexus's training statements sit on its security and AI pages and cover public or shared models, and its Subscription Terms do not name AI training. Plexus lawyers review trade promotion terms as a service alongside the software. Neither vendor reviewed this page.