Most legal tech vendors price per seat. It is easy to explain to investors, easy to negotiate at land, and easy to model in sales projections. It is also, for most legal tech tools, the wrong answer.
The right answer for most horizontal legal tech products (research, knowledge management, drafting, contract intelligence) is the model Practical Law, one of the earliest success stories of what would come to be called “legal tech,” built and proved at scale a decade before the current generation of legal tech vendors started raising venture capital.
In this article, we will examine the Practical Law playbook, why per-seat caps your own growth while the whole-firm model compounds, the pricing architecture decision, what modern legal tech vendors are getting wrong -- and the few contexts in which per-seat is genuinely the right answer.