How we grade.
The rubric, the weights, the sources, and the conflicts - on one page, written in the plainest English we can manage.
§ I The rubric
We evaluate every vendor against seven criteria: pricing transparency, tier breadth, firm-size coverage, practice-area coverage, trust-accounting capability, integration ecosystem, and pricing history depth. Each criterion carries a declared weight. Pricing transparency counts double because it directly affects buyer risk. A vendor that gates pricing behind a demo call is, by definition, harder to evaluate accurately.
Scores are produced by a deterministic function applied to the same structured data fields across all 30 vendors. The formula is documented publicly and recomputed on every build, so scores update automatically when pricing data changes.
Score formula, in full: pricing transparency (2.5 pts) + tier breadth (2.0 pts) + firm-size coverage (2.0 pts) + practice-area coverage (1.5 pts) + IOLTA signal (1.0 pts) + data richness (1.0 pts). Maximum 10.0.
§ II The stopwatch
Pricing is scraped nightly from each vendor's public pricing page using Firecrawl. We extract tier names, monthly and annual per-seat pricing, and feature lists from the scraped HTML using an LLM extraction step with explicit schema validation. Each price is timestamped and the source URL is stored alongside the value.
We supplement current pricing with historical pricing reconstructed from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. For each vendor we pull Wayback snapshots from 2020 onward and extract pricing tiers from each snapshot using the same pipeline. This produces the sparkline visible on every vendor review.
When a vendor gates pricing behind a demo request or contact form, we flag the tier as gated and do not estimate a price. We never publish speculative pricing.
§ III The sources
Every claim on this site is backed by either an automated data pipeline or a cited primary source. Compliance claims (IOLTA, three-way reconciliation, state bar rules) cite primary sources directly - the relevant state bar page or American Bar Association rule.
We are not attorneys and do not give legal advice. If you are evaluating software for trust-accounting compliance, verify with your state bar and a qualified attorney or CPA.
§ IV The conflicts
We have applied to affiliate programs with most of the vendors we cover.
Affiliate links in reviews are tagged with rel="sponsored nofollow"
and visibly disclosed on every page that contains them. Commission rates do
not influence our rankings, verdicts, or editorial choices.
Maxime J. is an independent analyst with no employment or equity relationship with any vendor covered on this site. Pixite Product Management SRL (publisher) has no equity, debt, or contractual relationship with any vendor beyond standard affiliate agreements.
Corrections are logged publicly at caseledge.com/corrections with the date, nature of the error, and the fix. If you find an error on this site, email hello@caseledge.com.