MyCase
MyCase is legal practice management software for small and mid-sized firms, holding cases, contacts, documents, calendars, time entry, billing and trust accounting in one place, with a client portal, two-way texting and online payments through LawPay. Its intake side runs customisable web forms, a legal CRM pipeline for tracking leads from first contact to signed retainer, and automated generation and e-signature of engagement documents. The AI layer is 8am IQ, a set of assistants embedded in the product rather than sold separately: Case Assistant answers natural-language questions across a case's documents, notes, events, invoices, messages and call logs and returns answers with citations linking back to the source; Discovery Assistant runs OCR over scanned and image files so they become searchable; Document Assistant extracts parties, dates, obligations and clauses; and Writing Assistant summarises, rephrases and translates client communication. Access is controlled by a firm-wide AI setting held by the account owner, and the assistants can only reach records a user is already permitted to see. MyCase is a product of 8am, LLC, formerly AffiniPay, alongside LawPay, CasePeer and DocketWise; the platform serves legal and accounting professionals in the United States and Canada and states that more than 19,000 firms use it.
Capability grades
All 15 axes, graded from public sources on the date shown. 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.
MyCase is a fifteen-year-old practice management system with an AI layer bolted in, and the vendor is candid about which is which. Cases, contacts, calendars, documents, time entry, invoicing, trust accounting and the client portal are conventional software and make up the whole of the Basic tier, which includes no AI at all. 8am IQ appears at Pro (Writing and Document Assistants) and Advanced (adding Case and Discovery Assistants), priced into the tier rather than sold separately. Remove the models and the product a firm runs its practice on is untouched. B on the band: the models are the engine of a core capability layered on a product that would plainly still function without them. Pages read 1 September 2026.
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 real, documented and mechanically described. Case Assistant answers questions across a case's documents, notes, calendar events, invoices, transactions, tasks, case fields, portal messages, SMS and call logs, and the vendor states every answer includes a source you can trace back and verify before you act. The retrieval method is set out in the Terms: documents and data for a case are converted into a vector database format by an embedding process performed case by case, then retrieved by the LLM. The vendor also states it runs proprietary evaluation metrics to measure and monitor accuracy and hallucination detection, and constrains the surface by supporting only pre-configured prompts customised per task. What holds this at B is that none of that measurement is published: the metrics are proprietary, no figure, test set or error rate appears anywhere, and the Terms acknowledge output may contain errors, omissions or inaccuracies with no warranty of accuracy. The evaluation regime itself is graded on AI Governance rather than spent twice.
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.
Nothing runs unattended, and the vendor says so directly: data is never stored or analysed passively and is only processed when a user asks a question. Control sits at two levels. Firm level, availability of 8am IQ is governed by a firm-wide AI setting managed by the account owner, and disabling it removes access for every authorised user; the Terms make the firm responsible for configuring that setting in line with its own policies and professional obligations. User level, 8am IQ honours existing permissions so a user cannot reach through it anything they could not already open. Review is built into the output through source citations, and the Terms require human review, stating output may not be relied on as a substitute for professional judgment. B rather than A because no thresholds are published and there is no described escalation path; the product is a user-invoked query tool rather than an agent, so the route-back-to-human limb of the band does not really engage.
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.
A named firm with a figure, and portfolio metrics with an unusually candid method. Vi Nanthaveth of Nanthaveth & Associates, PLLC is on record describing a move from meeting three or four people a day to fifteen. The headline metrics carry a real methodology footnote rather than a bare number: the 64 hours of billable time recovered per year is attributed to an analysis of anonymised MyCase customer data covering firms using the Smart Time Finder feature, averaging 5.3 hours a month, and the ROI calculator's revenue figure is stated to be built from that same figure plus the user's own inputs, with the whole thing labelled an estimate and not a guarantee. Publishing the derivation of a marketing number is rare. B rather than A because nothing is dated, the remaining testimonials are first-name-only and read as review-site extracts, and the 37% caseload figure carries no stated basis.
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.
One limb short of the top band, and the limb it clears best is the one most vendors miss. Training is answered in the agreement, not on a marketing page: Part III states 8am does not use Customer Content or IQ Content to train or fine-tune any large language model or other generative AI model, whether its own or a third party's, and that the substantive content of inputs and outputs is never used to update model weights. Retention is specific: the LLMs used to provide 8am IQ may retain IQ Content for up to thirty days, and case data in the vector database is deleted automatically after thirty days of inactivity. Segregation is documented and inherited rather than reinvented, with 8am IQ unable to reach any record the user cannot already access, and the vendor states safeguards prevent exposure between customers. What is missing for A is express treatment of privilege and work product, which is nowhere addressed for a system indexing a firm's whole case file. Also worth a buyer's eye: Part III states an authorised user's Case Assistant chat history cannot be deleted.
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.
The most complete treatment of this axis located in the pull, and all of it sits in the agreement rather than a footer. The vendor states plainly what it is not: Part I says 8am does not provide legal or accounting advice and is not engaged in the practice of law, and Part III says 8am IQ does not provide legal, accounting or other professional advice and that output may not be relied on as a substitute for professional judgment or human review. Who may use it is scoped and that scope is jurisdictional: the Platform is stated to be intended for legal, accounting and other client-based professionals located in the United States and Canada. The competence and supervision dimension is addressed rather than assumed — using 8am IQ to engage in the unauthorized practice of law, or to offer legal advice without a qualified person reviewing the information, is an express prohibited activity; the customer is made responsible for using the Platform in compliance with the rules of professional conduct applicable to its profession; and the firm-wide AI setting gives an account owner the switch to enforce that. The disclaimer also recommends consulting qualified counsel on compliance obligations. The consumer-facing-disclosure limb does not engage, since 8am IQ is an internal tool for firm staff rather than a client-facing agent.
AI Governance and Bias Disclosure
Published governance over model behaviour: who owns it inside the vendor, what is tested before release, and what is disclosed about disparate output across matter types, parties, or populations.
A published framework with real substance and no results behind it. There is a dedicated 8am IQ Usage Policy incorporated by reference into the Agreement, which is a governance artifact rather than a marketing page, alongside a published statement of principles for building AI in legal technology. The mechanism is described: proprietary evaluation metrics to measure and monitor accuracy and hallucination detection, task-specific pre-configured prompts to raise the likelihood of accurate responses, and a stated commitment to continued testing. Governance also has a control surface in the firm-wide AI setting. What is absent is everything the A band adds: no individual or committee is named as accountable for the AI, no pre-release testing regime is described in terms a buyer could audit, no evaluation result is disclosed, and nothing addresses uneven output across matter types, practice areas or populations. B.
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 across most of the ground, with the subprocessor list the notable hole. Retention is stated with a number rather than a gesture — thirty days at the LLM layer, thirty days of inactivity before embedded case data is automatically deleted and the embedding re-run on next use. Encryption is specified as 128-bit SSL in transit and 256-bit AES at rest. Access control is documented through per-user permission inheritance. A security and privacy whitepaper is published at an ungated link, and a trust centre exists at trust.8am.com. Incident practice is addressed in the Terms, though asymmetrically: the customer must report a data incident within twenty-four hours to a named security address, and 8am reserves the sole right to determine whether and how notice is given to individuals or regulators. Not located: any subprocessor list, and any statement of where data is hosted. B on the band's own named exception.
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.
Specific, readable and pointed entirely one way. The Terms cap total cumulative liability at the net fees earned by 8am during the three months immediately preceding the event giving rise to the claim, which is the shortest cap located in this pull, and exclude all indirect, incidental, special, consequential and punitive damages. The Platform is provided as is and with all faults, with an express refusal to warrant that information, data or AI output will be accurate, complete, reliable or compliant with applicable law. Part III adds a dedicated AI carve-out: 8am will not be liable for any damages arising out of errors or inaccuracies in output or reliance on it. The only indemnity runs from the customer to 8am, and claims must be brought within one year. There is no indemnity to the customer, no warranty on output and no insurance position. C: liability addressed only through a limitation clause that disclaims the exposure the product creates.
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.
Real integrations, named partners and public developer documentation, short of described depth. The pricing matrix states 70-plus integrations at the Pro tier and an Open API at Advanced, and names the connected tools in the feature comparison: Google, Outlook, Microsoft Office, QuickBooks, Zapier, LawToolBox for court rules calendaring and Smith.ai. Payments run through LawPay within the same platform, and Desktop Drive provides two-way file sync between a user's desktop and MyCase. A public developer site at developers.8am.com carries a quickstart guide and API reference, which is documentation an implementer can actually use. B rather than A because what each integration moves, in which direction, and what a firm must configure is not described on any page read on 1 September 2026; the dedicated integrations page was not opened and is the rebuttal route.
Deployment Model and Data Residency
Where the software runs and where the data sits. Multi tenant cloud, single tenant, private deployment, on premises, and whether region of residence is a published option or an enterprise conversation.
Cloud delivery is evident and neither dimension is published. No tenancy model is stated anywhere, and no data residency region is offered or named. The closest thing to a location statement is a market scope rather than a hosting one: the Terms say the Platform is intended for professionals located in the United States and Canada. Nothing distinguishes where data is processed from where it is stored, and no hosting provider is identified on any surface read on 1 September 2026, though the Terms do refer generically to failures of cloud hosting providers in the force majeure clause. The trust centre at trust.8am.com was not opened and is the rebuttal route. C on the band's words.
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.
Certification is stated and a trust centre exists, without the particulars that would let a buyer test it. 8am states it is SOC 2 Type II certified on the 8am IQ page, links that claim to the AICPA, operates a trust centre at trust.8am.com linked from the footer of both mycase.com and 8am.com, and publishes a security and privacy whitepaper at an open Google Drive link with no form, NDA or sales conversation in the way — an ungated artifact, which is more than most of this pull offers. The Terms also commit to complying with PCI-DSS for payment processing. What is missing is the attestation detail: no auditor is named, no trust services criteria or scope are given, and no coverage period or report date appears on any readable surface. The trust centre itself was not opened on 1 September 2026, so whether reports are downloadable there was not established and nothing is graded against the vendor for it.
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.
The architecture is described in real detail and the providers are never named. The Terms state 8am IQ is enabled via large language models, describe the pipeline — case documents and data converted by an embedding process into a vector database format for retrieval by the LLM, performed case by case — and go further than most by stating what the model layer does with the data: the LLMs used to provide 8am IQ may retain IQ Content for up to thirty days, and that data will not be used to train any LLM. That is a genuine statement about what the underlying provider may retain. But no model and no provider is identified anywhere. Claude appears in the Terms only to be excluded, in a clause stating that third-party services including Claude are not 8am AI-powered features and are governed by the customer's own agreement with them. No subprocessor list and no change-notification commitment was located. B on the band's second limb, architecture described without the providers.
Commercial Transparency
Whether a buyer can learn what this costs without entering a sales process: published rates, the unit being charged, what sits behind an enterprise tier, and what implementation adds.
A buyer can price this firm-wide without speaking to anyone, which is what the band asks and what almost nothing else in this pull delivers. All three tiers carry published rates at both billing frequencies: Basic $50 annual or $60 monthly, Pro $100 or $120, Advanced $130 or $150, all USD per user per month, with the annual saving stated per plan. The unit is explicit and the FAQ repeats that the rate depends on the number of active firm users. A full feature comparison shows exactly what each tier buys, including which AI assistants sit at which level. Implementation is addressed head-on rather than left as an unknown: guided implementation, training sessions and support are stated to carry no additional cost, and the FAQ confirms no long-term contract and no setup fee. Add-ons are priced too — MyCase Accounting at $39 per user per month, LawPay at no monthly fee — and even the AI overage carries a rate, at $30 for an additional 5,000 Discovery Assistant pages against an allowance of 5,000 pages per user per month pooled across the firm. A ten-day trial runs without a card.
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.
Segment and practice coverage are described with substance and the boundaries are only half drawn. Six practice areas carry their own pages — criminal defence, family, immigration, bankruptcy, personal injury, and trust and estate — with a further index behind them, and the product is positioned throughout at small and mid-sized firms. One real limit is stated and it is jurisdictional: the Terms scope the Platform to legal, accounting and other client-based professionals located in the United States and Canada, and a separate clause addresses use by the US Government. Practice-specific depth is evidenced in the feature set, with conflict check tracking, statute-of-limitations deadlines, trust-by-case balances and court rules calendaring. B rather than A because no firm-size segmentation is published in the way the band contemplates, in-house and government legal departments are not addressed as buyers, and nothing states which practice types the product handles poorly.
Legal Signals
What each signal meansA signal records what public sources say on the date shown. It is not a grade and it is not a recommendation. Where a signal reads Not addressed, it means the index did not locate the material in public sources on that date, which is a statement about disclosure rather than about the product.
Client Data in Training
Can material a lawyer puts into this product be used to train a model?
The published terms prohibit training on customer content. Not a policy page, the agreement.
The commitment sits in the published agreement rather than on a marketing page, and it covers both directions. Part III of the Terms states 8am does not use Customer Content or IQ Content to train or fine-tune any large language model or other generative AI model, whether developed by 8am or a third party, and that the substantive content of inputs and outputs is never used to update model weights or incorporated into training data. It expressly carves the improvement activity out of training: inputs, outputs and usage data may be used to monitor and improve accuracy, safety and performance, including aggregated human and automated review, and the Terms state those activities do not involve training or fine-tuning. Part I separately retains a perpetual licence over aggregated and anonymised Customer Content excluding personal information for internal product development. Notably the agreement is more protective than the marketing FAQ, which describes the commitment only as covering third-party models.
Prompt and Output Retention
How long does the product keep what a lawyer typed, and can that be set to zero?
A specific retention period is published and the customer cannot change it.
A specific period is published at two layers and the customer cannot change either. The Terms state the LLMs used to provide 8am IQ may retain IQ Content for up to thirty days, and that case data held in the vector database is retained for up to thirty days following the last activity on a case, after which the embedded data is automatically deleted and the embedding re-run on next use. Against that, the Terms also state each authorised user has an individual Case Assistant chat history which cannot be deleted and is retained under the Privacy Policy, so the prompt record itself persists on terms the firm does not control. Recorded as a disclosed fixed window on that basis.
Ethical Walls and Matter Segregation
Does retrieval respect the firm’s ethical walls, or can the model read across them?
Retrieval enforces the source system access model at query time, per user, and the vendor documents it.
Retrieval enforces the platform's own access model at query time, per user, and the vendor documents it in two places. The 8am IQ page states that 8am enforces user permissions so 8am IQ can only access data a user already has rights to view, and that 8am IQ honours existing permissions such that a user cannot use it for any item within MyCase they cannot already access, linking to the user-permissions help article. MyCase is itself the system of record, so the source system whose access model is inherited is the practice management platform rather than a separate document store. The same page states safeguards prevent a customer's confidential data being exposed to another 8am customer. Nothing separately addresses conflict walls erected for a specific matter.
Third Party Request and Subpoena Notice
If someone subpoenas the vendor for a firm’s data, does the firm hear about it first?
Terms commit to notice where lawfully permitted. No transparency report located.
Part I of the Terms provides that where a party is required by law or by order of a court, regulatory authority or other governmental body to disclose the other's Confidential Information, the receiving party will give prompt notice to the disclosing party, to the extent permitted by applicable law, to allow it to seek a protective order or other appropriate remedy. The obligation is mutual and appears in the published customer agreement. A related clause runs the other way and is worth a buyer noting: where 8am must respond to a subpoena or other compulsory process relating to the customer's account, the customer agrees on request to compensate 8am for staff time at a rate 8am sets and to reimburse related costs. Recorded at the committed tier because no transparency report was located on 1 September 2026.
Primary Law Corpus Provenance
Where does the law in this product come from, and does the vendor have the right to use it?
No located public material identifies the corpus behind the product’s answers.
The product does not retrieve primary law, so there is no legal corpus to source. 8am IQ operates only on the firm's own case record: documents, notes, calendar events, invoices, transactions, tasks, case fields, portal messages, SMS and call logs, converted into a per-case vector database. No public material identifies any statutory or case law source, licence basis or update cadence, checked across the MyCase home and pricing pages, the 8am IQ page and the full Terms of Service on 1 September 2026. Recorded as not addressed because the question does not arise for this product class.
Good Law Verification
Does the product tell you when the authority it just cited has been overruled?
No located public material addresses whether authority is checked for subsequent history.
No citator, and none would apply. 8am IQ answers questions about a firm's own matters and extracts details from the firm's own documents; it does not retrieve or cite legal authority whose subsequent history could be checked. The citations it produces point back to the customer's own case records. Nothing on any surface read on 1 September 2026 addresses primary legal authority.
Refusal and Uncertainty Behaviour
What does the product do when the answer is not in the corpus?
No located public material addresses what the product does when it cannot ground an answer.
No located public material addresses what the product does when it cannot ground an answer. The vendor describes mitigation rather than abstention: proprietary evaluation metrics to measure and monitor accuracy and hallucination detection, and task-specific pre-configured prompts to increase the likelihood of an accurate response. It also states plainly that output may still be misleading or inaccurate and recommends the user review everything before relying on it, which places the check on the reader rather than describing a no-answer path in the product. No confidence signal and no documented abstention behaviour was found across the 8am IQ page, the MyCase pages and the Terms on 1 September 2026.
Fabricated Citation Record
Does a public court record exist involving output from this product?
No court order, opinion or disciplinary record naming this product has been located as of the date shown. This is a statement about the public record, not a finding about the product.
No court order, opinion or disciplinary record naming this product has been located. The AI Hallucination Cases database maintained by Damien Charlotin was searched on 1 September 2026 on both the product name and the AI brand 8am IQ, alongside general sanctions coverage, and nothing naming the product was found. This is a statement about the public record rather than a finding about the product. 8am IQ cites the firm's own case records rather than legal authority, so the failure mode this signal tracks is not one the product exhibits.
Bar Guidance Alignment
Has the vendor engaged in public with the ethics opinions its buyers are bound by?
Public materials refer to professional responsibility in general terms without naming guidance.
Professional responsibility is referenced in general terms without any named guidance. The Terms require the customer to use the Platform in compliance with the rules of professional conduct applicable to its profession, make configuration of the firm-wide AI setting the firm's responsibility in line with applicable professional or ethical obligations, and prohibit using 8am IQ to engage in the unauthorized practice of law. The vendor publishes a blog piece framed around bar associations weighing in on AI compliance, and states partnership with more than 130 bar associations including the American Bar Association and several state bars, but those are commercial relationships rather than engagement with guidance. ABA Formal Opinion 512 is not named and no state bar opinion is cited on any surface read on 1 September 2026.
Billing and Fee Posture
Does the vendor address what happens to the bill when the work takes an hour instead of six?
Public materials claim time savings without addressing billing or disclosure.
Time and revenue savings are published prominently and the billing consequence of AI-assisted work is not addressed. The vendor claims 64 hours of billable time recovered per year, 37% more cases with the same team, and runs an ROI calculator projecting annual revenue increase from a firm's own inputs. The product captures billable time in detail through Smart Time Finder and produces invoices, but nothing identifies which work was AI-assisted or offers guidance on how that should be recorded or disclosed on a client bill. Notable because this is a billing product whose AI explicitly compresses document review and drafting. Checked 1 September 2026.
Outside Counsel Guideline Readiness
Can a firm get this vendor through a client’s AI clause without a bespoke negotiation?
The material exists behind a sales conversation or an executed agreement.
Some client-facing material is published and the artifact that matters most is not. A security and privacy whitepaper is available at an ungated link with no form or NDA, a trust centre operates at trust.8am.com, and the Terms and the 8am IQ Usage Policy are both public and contain the no-training commitment a firm would need to forward. But no subprocessor list was located anywhere, and no model provider is named, so a firm could not tell a client whose model processes its content without asking. The trust centre was not opened on 1 September 2026 and may hold a subprocessor list; nothing is graded against the vendor for that.
Court Disclosure Support
If a judge’s standing order requires an AI disclosure, can the product produce one?
Some elements of the record are available, short of a document level export.
Some elements of a record exist without a disclosure-oriented export. Case Assistant answers carry citations traced back to the underlying case records, each authorised user has an individual chat history that is retained and cannot be deleted, and the Terms state responses may be copied, saved or exported. Together that means what was asked, what was answered and what it drew on is recoverable per user. What is missing is the rest: no model is identified against any output, no human verification step is recorded, and nothing frames any of it as a disclosure record for a court. Checked 1 September 2026.