Legal Desk AI vs Claude for legal work

The honest starting point

An advocate told us that a friend spent about ₹2,000 a month on Claude and drafted roughly three times as many files as he managed on Legal Desk AI for the same money.

We checked it rather than argued with it, and the shape of the claim holds up. This page exists because that is a fair thing to say and it deserves a straight answer instead of a sales one.

Claude is a very good model. If what you want is more drafted words for a fixed monthly fee, it will give you more of them.

Why the counts differ

Legal Desk AI meters words, in and out. Attach a thirty page petition so the draft is grounded in the record and those pages are part of what you spend; attach a document to every draft and the input side, not the output, is most of the bill. Typed text is counted as text. An attached PDF is counted per page at a flat rate, so a thin scanned sheet costs what a dense one does. That is worth knowing before you attach a paperbook to a two-line question.

Claude Pro constrains you by time: a rolling five-hour session window, with weekly limits on top for paid plans. Attachments count against that window too, but for steady drafting it binds less often than a word budget does. A lawyer who works from long attachments is precisely the person a metered plan treats worst, and that is a fair criticism of how we price.

What happens when you run out is worth knowing before it happens, on whatever you use. Here it is a booster pack, ₹99 for 25,000 words, on the plan you are already on: a flat price in rupees, bought and spent in the same minute. Whatever you are comparing us against, find out what running out costs there, and in which currency, before the evening you need to know.

It cuts the other way too. Their ceiling costs nothing to wait out; ours costs money. A lawyer with more time than budget will reasonably prefer the plan where running out is free.

Drafts per hour, not drafts per rupee

Here is the question nobody asked the advocate who counted three times the drafts.

What did he do with them afterwards?

A model returns prose. A filing needs a cause title, numbered paragraphs, a prayer, a verification, and annexures marked and referred to correctly. Somebody does that work at the end of every draft.

Who that is depends on the practice. In chambers with juniors, retyping a draft into house format is not the senior's afternoon, it is theirs, and a flat plan with a junior behind it is a perfectly good arrangement. For a sole practitioner, or a junior who is the whole chambers, it is your afternoon, and the count that matters is drafts per hour rather than drafts per rupee.

The model has little to do with that. It is the one part of our product we did not build, and the one part available to everybody. What we built is the brief behind each tool, the document pipeline, retrieval over your own library, the engine that produces the document, and the practice layer around it. Whether you get a filing or a first draft is decided there.

What the DOCX actually is

Since the argument rests on it, here is what comes out when you press download, starting with what a Word template already does for you. If you draft in a general assistant, keep a blank template with the paper, margins and font set and paste into it. That fixes the page once, for every draft after; we are not going to pretend the paper size is a recurring cost.

What a template cannot fix is the per-draft work: paragraph numbering that has to survive a late addition, annexure references that have to point at the right exhibit after the grounds are reordered, the cause title for this matter. Those are done again for every document, and they are the twenty minutes.

Our numbering is real Word numbering, not numbers typed as text. Insert a paragraph in the middle of the grounds and everything after it renumbers, and a sequence carries on correctly past an intervening heading. Annexures are labelled and referred to in the body.

The page follows a style profile. The default is Legal paper, 4 cm margins left and right, 2 cm top and bottom, Times New Roman at 14 point, double spaced, justified: sensible defaults for Indian filing, not a national standard, since registries differ by state. So you can override all of it. At download time, take the default, pick a document from your saved upload library, or upload a fresh one, and the paper size, margins, font, spacing and list indents are read out of your .docx. The draft opens in Word looking like something your chambers produced, because it was measured off something your chambers produced.

A second, separate control works on the written shape. Hand Quick Draft or Quick Reply one of your own earlier drafts as a Style Reference and the new one follows its headings, its numbering scheme, the way it opens and closes. One control for how the document reads, one for how it looks.

Two limits. Style Reference is an instruction to the model, in strong terms, that every party name, date and figure in the reference belongs to a different case and must not appear in the new draft. An instruction, not a filter, so read the output as you would anyway. And the engine does not produce Word's named paragraph styles or outline levels, so the navigation pane will not show a heading tree.

This applies to Quick Draft, Quick Reply, Legal Opinion and Grounded Validation (Beta). Other tools give a plainer Word export.

What you have to type

Open Legal Desk AI, pick Analysis, attach the record, and type this:

I represent the petitioner.

That is enough. What comes back is a structured analysis in the legal register, because the persona, the output shape and the instruction not to invent authority are already inside the tool. Put the same four words into a general chat window and you get a polite question back, because it has not been told who it is or what a good answer looks like.

You can fix that on Claude, and if you use it for legal work you should: set up a project, put a standing brief in its instructions, and every chat in that project starts from it. What stays with you is the brief. You write it, and you revise it when a draft comes back wrong. Ours was written for one job and we revise it against real drafts, which is the part you are actually buying.

One smaller point. The settings that governed how freely a model improvises have been removed on current models and replaced with a different control, so anything you tuned last year is not where you left it. On our side a change like that is absorbed before you see it.

The work that is not drafting

Drafting is the part of practice a chat window can reach. Most of the rest is not.

Claude cannot tell you what is listed tomorrow. It cannot read a cause list into a diary, check a matter against eCourts overnight, or send you a morning email with what is listed and before which bench. No prompt fixes that. The missing pieces are a standing connection to Indian court infrastructure and a place to keep the record between conversations.

That is what the Court Diary does, in Beta, which we mean in the ordinary sense: it works and it will keep changing. Today it takes a cause list PDF or a typed entry, sections each day by the court the matter is listed in, picks up a CNR you record on the next sync with eCourts, and exports a day as DOCX or to print. Automatic discovery of your listings from the court's own board is Gujarat High Court only for now; a CNR you record yourself is looked up wherever it sits. PDF export is hidden on a day containing Hindi or another non-Latin script, because the PDF engine cannot shape those scripts and a file with text missing is worse than no button.

Billing (Beta) keeps a ledger of bills with paid and unpaid status and settles one in a click. Contracts (Beta) gives you Indian templates, turns your own agreements into reusable ones, and fills a CSV against a template to create a batch. SMRITI is a private library rather than an attachment: what you upload stays searchable across every matter and tool, by meaning as well as by words, when you switch retrieval on for a job. Beside it sits a free-to-read corpus of Supreme Court judgments and a case law search (Beta).

If drafting is all you need, none of this matters. If you are running a practice, it is most of the job.

On privacy, both of us are careful

Anthropic's published policy for its consumer plans is that your chats are used to improve Claude only if you switch on Model Improvement in Privacy Settings, and Incognito chats are left out even if you have. That is a good default and lawyers should know it is there.

On our side there is nothing to switch. We do not use your prompts, responses or documents to train AI models, and there is no setting that changes that. Every lawyer gets their own dedicated database, so your matters, documents and AI history are never co-mingled with another lawyer's.

This is a difference in design, not a claim that anyone is behaving badly.

Two questions to ask before paying

What happens to your library if you stop paying. Your matters, uploads and drafts stay where they are, and you can sign in, read and download them; what stops is the AI spend. What we do clear is an account nobody has signed in to for ninety days without a live plan, with emails at sixty, seventy and eighty days first.

What happens when the allowance runs out mid-matter. You buy a booster pack, ₹99 for 25,000 words, and continue on the same plan. Ask the same question of anything else you are considering, and ask what the top-up costs and in which currency.

The citation question, which is not about Claude

This applies to every AI tool on the market, ours included, and it is the one place where getting it wrong is expensive.

A language model on its own does not look anything up. It produces probable text, and a citation that does not exist can be exactly as probable looking as one that does. LiveLaw's reporting on phantom precedents sets out where that has gone in India: Supreme Court notices to the Attorney General and the Bar Council after a trial court relied on AI generated rulings that did not exist, ₹50,000 in costs from the Bombay High Court in January 2026 for fake citations, a Delhi High Court petition withdrawn in September 2025 over invented paragraphs in a judgment that has 27 of them. The costs orders are the mild end; Bar Council rules and Section 35 of the Advocates Act, 1961 sit behind them. None of these incidents is attributed to Claude.

Legal Desk AI is built so that, when you turn retrieval on for a job, the material most likely to need checking comes from your own library or from actual judgments, with the source shown next to the output. That does not remove verification. It changes it from hunting for invented material to confirming sources we have already named.

If you use a general assistant instead, the protocol lives with you: never cite what you have not opened. We wrote a longer piece on doing that properly.

Choosing between them

Take Claude for thinking: reading a long record, working through an argument, general professional writing. A lawyer who is comfortable shaping the output into a filing, or has a junior who is, will get a lot out of it. If your work is mostly analysis and advice rather than filings, and you can wait out a window when you hit one, the flat plan is the better buy.

Take Legal Desk AI when the document has to leave as a document, when running out has to mean topping up rather than waiting, and when the hearings, cause lists, bills, contracts and judgment library belong in the same place as the drafting.

A chambers is a different comparison. Sharing one consumer login across a firm is against the provider's terms, so the honest match for a firm is their per-seat team plan against VIDHI, our firm product, which is a separate page.

Plenty of lawyers will keep both. Just count the right thing when you compare them.