If you've heard "AI for lawyers" mentioned twice in the last year, there's a good chance one of those mentions was Harvey or Spellbook. Both use AI to speed up legal work, but they're not really competing for the same job. Harvey is a broad platform meant to replace multiple legal workflows at once; Spellbook is a much narrower tool that lives inside Microsoft Word and focuses specifically on contracts. Picking between them mostly comes down to how big your legal team is and how much of your work is contract-shaped.
Harvey: the full-platform option for large firms
Harvey handles legal research, document drafting, contract analysis, and multi-step legal workflows in one platform, and it's been adopted by a majority of Am Law 100 firms — a genuinely hard signal to fake, since large firms don't switch legal infrastructure casually. It's backed by the OpenAI Startup Fund alongside Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins, and was valued at $11B as of March 2026.
Best for: large law firms, in-house legal teams at major corporations, and professional services organizations that need breadth across legal work, not just contracts.
Points forts:
- Covers research, drafting, contracts, and workflow automation in one platform
- Vault and Shared Spaces are built for large-firm scale and confidentiality requirements
- Backed by top-tier VC money, which matters for a firm betting long-term infrastructure on a vendor
Points faibles:
- Enterprise-only pricing puts it out of reach for solo practitioners or small firms
- Usage statistics are self-reported, not independently audited
- Broader scope than most firms below the largest tier actually need
Price: no public pricing — enterprise-only, demo required.
Spellbook: contract review without leaving Word
Spellbook does one job and does it inside the tool lawyers already use: it works directly in Microsoft Word, flagging risky clauses and suggesting redlines as you review a document. Its "Playbooks" feature encodes a firm's own standards so review stays consistent across different lawyers, and it benchmarks contract terms against market norms rather than just catching typos or missing clauses. It's used by 4,500+ legal teams across 80+ countries, including named customers like Dropbox, eBay, and Crocs.
Best for: in-house legal teams, law firms, and solo practitioners whose work is mostly commercial contracts and who don't want to adopt a whole new platform.
Points forts:
- No new platform to learn — it works inside Word directly
- Benchmarks contract terms against market standards, not just error-flagging
- Playbooks give institutional consistency across a whole team's contract review
Points faibles:
- Focused specifically on contracts — no broader legal research like Harvey offers
- No public per-seat pricing, so you need a sales call just to get a quote
- Its 10M+ contracts figure is an aggregate, not broken down per customer
Price: custom, usage-based pricing by team size; 7-day free trial; free access for academic institutions.
Side by side
| Harvey | Spellbook | |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Research, drafting, contracts, workflows | Contract review and drafting only |
| Where it lives | Standalone platform | Inside Microsoft Word |
| Best fit | Large firms, in-house teams at major corporations | Firms and solo lawyers focused on contracts |
| Pricing model | Enterprise-only, no public rate | Usage-based by team size, 7-day trial |
| Notable customers | Majority of Am Law 100 firms | Dropbox, eBay, Crocs |
Verdict
Pick Harvey if you're a large firm or in-house team that needs AI across research, drafting, and contracts, and you have the budget and scale to justify enterprise infrastructure. Pick Spellbook if contract review is most of what you do day to day, and you'd rather get a tool working inside Word this week than roll out a new platform firm-wide. Both are aimed at the same broad shift — AI doing first-pass legal work — but they're solving it at very different altitudes.