Legal research for solo practitioners, without the enterprise bill

Last updated July 2026

The economics of legal research were designed for firms, not for you. Westlaw's published small-firm pricing runs roughly $133–$400 per user per month depending on coverage; LexisNexis lands in a similar band once you add the jurisdictions and citator history you actually need; both typically want a one- to three-year commitment, and out-of-plan document fees punish you for having a case wander into the wrong jurisdiction. For a solo billing $250/hour, that's real money — $2,400 to $4,800 a year — for a tool you may use a few hours a week.

The uncomfortable industry fact is that the primary law itself — the opinions, the statutes — is public record. What you're paying the incumbents for is search, citators, and editorial content, priced at what institutional buyers will bear.

What a solo actually needs

Strip the workflow to what wins cases and it's four things: find the controlling authority (including cases you wouldn't have keyword-guessed), read it in full, check what's happened to it since, and build the argument. Everything else in an enterprise research contract is either secondary sources — valuable for some practices, dead weight for others — or workflow tooling for teams you don't have.

How MayaClerk covers those four

Finding authority: hybrid search over 10.6 million federal and state opinions — full-text precision when you know the phrase, semantic retrieval when you know the issue. Natural-language queries like "landlord's duty to mitigate after abandonment, commercial lease" return on-point authority without Boolean gymnastics, and court-hierarchy weighting puts controlling courts first.

Reading it: every opinion in the corpus, full text, in every plan. No per-document fees, no out-of-plan jurisdictions — those concepts don't exist here.

Checking treatment: a citation graph across the corpus. Every case citing your case, with the citing passages surfaced, so you evaluate treatment from the actual language rather than a colored flag.

Building the argument: David, an agentic research assistant, runs multi-step research and returns cited answers. For dispositive questions, a litigation dossier ($39, no subscription needed) delivers a structured memo where the opposing side's best arguments are stress-tested and every quotation is machine-verified against the source opinion.

What it costs

All plans are month-to-month. There is no annual contract, no auto-renewing multi-year term, and no sales call.

Where you should still keep something else

Honesty over conversion: if your practice runs on treatises and practice guides — heavy transactional work, specialized regulatory fields — MayaClerk doesn't replace those. Many solos handle this with occasional law-library access or a minimal secondary-source subscription alongside MayaClerk for primary law, and still come out thousands ahead of a full enterprise contract.

Frequently asked questions

Is this suitable for pro se litigants and paralegals too?

Yes — the free and Pro tiers exist precisely because meaningful research access shouldn't require a firm's budget. The same corpus and tools serve attorneys, paralegals, students, and self-represented litigants.

How current is the corpus?

The corpus is built on comprehensive public court data covering federal and state courts, with ongoing delta updates as new opinions publish.

What if I outgrow it?

Then you'll be a firm with a research budget, and the incumbents will happily take your call. Until that day, the month-to-month structure means trying MayaClerk costs you nothing but an afternoon.