Usage based pricing is solving Big Law's problem, not yours

Usage-based pricing is spreading across the legal AI market, and it makes sense once you look at who's driving the need for it.

Big law firms and legal departments and their legal engineers are running AI at a speed and volume that a flat monthly fee struggles to account for. Their large teams of legal engineers are running agents around the clock, chaining workflows across thousands of documents, building custom tooling on top of the platform itself, and at that scale, usage varies so widely between teams that pricing by consumption is the fair way to do it.

But a small- or medium-sized legal team isn't consuming AI near the volume that makes usage-based pricing necessary for now. What that team actually needs is a predictable monthly cost they can budget against.