Choosing between Harvey AI and CoCounsel isn’t always straightforward, especially if you’re trying to understand how each one fits into the way you actually work.
Both tools promise speed, support, and a smarter approach to legal tasks, and on the surface, they can feel pretty similar. Once you dig in, though, the differences start to matter.
Some teams need help with heavy research and quick summaries. Others want structure, predictable outputs, or more support for document review. And many are simply trying to avoid adding yet another tool that doesn’t play nicely with the rest of their setup.
If you’re trying to figure out which direction makes the most sense, this breakdown walks through the core purpose of each tool, how they actually work in practice, and what type of team tends to get the most value from them.
Harvey AI is a generative AI platform built for legal professionals, designed to support core legal tasks through natural-language responses. It launched in 2022 and quickly gained attention in the legal tech space due to its partnership with OpenAI and early adoption by major law firms.
The company positions itself as an AI legal assistant that helps lawyers work through research, drafting, and analysis more quickly, with a focus on compliance and controlled outputs.
Its rise has been fast, partly because Harvey was one of the first generative AI tools created specifically for the legal industry rather than adapted from a general model.
Harvey provides a structured environment for asking legal questions, reviewing documents, and generating text that aligns with firm-specific guidelines.
CoCounsel is an AI assistant built by Casetext (now part of Thomson Reuters) to help lawyers get through the kind of work that usually eats up hours.
It supports various legal tasks like reviewing long documents, checking contract language, answering research questions, and pulling details out of dense case materials.
What made it stand out early on was the way it was trained: human lawyers shaped the prompts, the workflows, and the guardrails. Through this technique, the tool feels built around real-world legal tasks rather than generic text generation.
It launched in 2023 and quickly picked up momentum across firms and legal departments that wanted a dependable way to tackle document analysis and routine legal processes more quickly.
CoCounsel is often described as a practical legal aide; something that reads, summarizes, and organizes information so human lawyers can stay focused on the judgment calls and strategy.
Aline is an AI-powered contract lifecycle management platform built for businesses and law firms that want a smoother way to handle every part of the contract process.
While other AI tools like Harvey and CoCounsel focus on narrower legal support, Aline covers the full contracting process (contract analysis, drafting, redlining, approvals, signatures, and long-term management) all in one system.
A big part of that experience comes from Aline’s Legal Copilot. It helps teams research issues, review language, answer contract-related questions, and give the rest of the organization quick access to details that usually take time to track down.
The platform also includes AlineSign for built-in e-signatures, AI-driven workflows that move agreements through reviews and approvals, and AI reporting that pulls renewal dates, obligations, and risks without manual research.
Leading law firms, procurement teams, finance, sales, and legal ops rely on Aline because it replaces scattered tools and keeps everything connected, consistent, and easy to manage as contract volume grows.
Book a demo to see how Aline fits into your contract process.
Sorting through Harvey AI, CoCounsel, and Aline all sit under the legal tech umbrella, but they solve very different problems.
Here’s a quick breakdown to help you see where each one fits and which direction makes the most sense for your workflow.
Harvey AI, CoCounsel, and Aline often get compared, but they’re built for very different jobs inside a modern legal practice.
Harvey AI is a generative artificial intelligence assistant meant to help legal teams move quickly through research and analysis.
Its main role is to support complex tasks like due diligence, spotting issues in long documents, and helping lawyers make sense of large amounts of information. Essentially, it acts as a fast research partner that still depends on human expertise for direction.
CoCounsel steps in for more structured, day-to-day legal tasks. It’s designed to handle things like document review, contract checking, and answering legal research questions with a predictable workflow.
The goal is reliability, and it delivers that by giving legal teams an AI legal tool that mirrors the way junior team members might work through early-stage assignments.
Aline focuses on something different: the full contract lifecycle. Its purpose is to help legal teams and business teams draft, redline, analyze, approve, sign, and manage contracts in one place.
It brings AI together with the operational tools needed to keep agreements moving, so teams don’t have to manage multiple platforms to stay organized.
Each one solves a different need, which makes the choice clearer once you know what problem you’re trying to fix.
Choosing between Harvey AI, CoCounsel, and Aline gets easier once you look at what each platform actually does best. Let's take a look at the standout features that shape how these tools fit into real legal work.
Harvey AI is a good match for small firms and mid-sized firms that handle research-heavy matters or sift through large volumes of case law.
Teams that want a fast generative AI assistant for drafting, summarizing, and early analysis tend to get the most value here. It works well for groups that already use multiple legal AI tools at once and want something that plugs into their existing research workflow.
CoCounsel fits mid-market firms and larger firms that need predictable, structured support for tasks like document review, research checks, and deposition prep.
It’s especially useful for teams that want AI to handle routine legal work with consistency. Firms that rely on dependable workflows rather than customization usually prefer CoCounsel’s approach.
Aline is ideal for organizations that want more than point solutions, especially legal, sales, finance, procurement, and operations teams that work with a high volume of contracts.
It supports small legal teams that need more leverage, mid-sized firms looking for operational control, and larger firms that want contract analysis, review, approvals, signing, and reporting in one system.
Aline is also a strong fit for teams replacing siloed tools and aiming to centralize their entire contract lifecycle.
Sorting out pricing helps clarify which tool fits your team’s budget and setup. Here’s a quick look at what each platform offers and what you can expect.
Pricing is not publicly available. Harvey doesn’t list plan details or seat-based pricing on its site.
Pricing is also not publicly available. Since CoCounsel operates under Thomson Reuters, costs vary by firm size, usage needs, and bundled products in the TR ecosystem.
Aline provides transparent pricing with both a team plan and an enterprise option.
Check out Aline’s pricing plans to see which option fits your team best.
Harvey AI and CoCounsel each bring useful AI support to specific parts of legal work, but Aline delivers something broader: a cutting-edge platform built to run the entire contract lifecycle in one place.
Its advanced features cover AI contract drafting, redlining, analysis, approvals, signing, and reporting, giving teams a single system that grows with them rather than another tool to juggle.
There’s also far less of a learning curve since Aline connects the AI layer with the actual workflows legal and business teams use every day. Instead of stitching together research tools, contract editors, signature apps, and reporting dashboards, everything lives inside one unified platform.
If your team wants more control, more speed, and fewer scattered systems, Aline offers the clearest path forward.
Harvey AI is generally accurate for research, drafting support, and early document review, but its output still depends on clear prompts and human oversight. It uses large language models to speed up legal analysis, though lawyers should validate anything tied to real decisions.
CoCounsel is used by a mix of mid-sized firms and larger firms, including several well-known practices that already rely on Thomson Reuters tools. Adoption continues to grow as CoCounsel becomes more integrated into TR’s legal ecosystem.
Harvey assistant works best for research-heavy assignments, quick summaries, and spotting issues in long documents. It’s helpful when lawyers need fast takeaways without manually reading large volumes of text.
Harvey can struggle with niche areas, unusual drafting styles, or documents that fall outside its training patterns. It’s strong for broad legal work, but it still requires human review to ensure accuracy and context.
AI tools collectively surpassed early expectations in document analysis, but each one approaches it differently. CoCounsel focuses on structured, repeatable checks, while Harvey offers flexible LLM-driven review. Key takeaways often depend on the type of document, the prompt, and how much human expertise shapes the workflow.
Harvey gives power users a flexible environment built on a lawyer baseline, making it useful for teams that want generative AI tools to adapt to complex review patterns. CoCounsel focuses on the seven core legal tasks with a more structured workflow, which helps firms that prefer predictable outputs in their legal tools. Aline takes a different path by incorporating AI directly into the contract lifecycle, combining phases like contract review and document summarization with the operational steps teams rely on every day.
Brent is an attorney, a full-stack JavaScript engineer and the CEO of Aline.
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