Stop overpaying
for legal.
The legal industry charges you for inefficiency. We charge for outcomes. $500 per document — attorney-reviewed, privileged, and final.
The Problem
Legal is broken. Everyone knows it.
Partners at major U.S. firms now charge up to $3,400 per hour. Junior associates at big firms bill $1,400/hr. Year-over-year rate increases are landing at 8–16% industry-wide, even after negotiated discounts.
Meanwhile, AI can automate 74% of the work those firms currently bill by the hour. A 20-hour contract review that becomes a 2-hour task doesn't reduce your bill at a traditional firm — they just find more hours to charge you.
If AI reduces a 20-hour project to 2 hours and you're billing hourly, the client just lost 90% of the value. If you're billing flat, you just delivered 10x the efficiency.
The market offers four alternatives, and each one has a fundamental flaw:
- Traditional law firms — elite quality, catastrophic pricing. You're paying for mahogany and overhead, not legal output.
- ALSPs — cheaper talent, still hourly. You traded the brand-name firm for a staffing agency with less accountability.
- AI tools — fast and cheap, but no attorney oversight. You're the lawyer now.
- DIY platforms — LegalZoom will file your LLC for $0, but try negotiating a SaaS agreement with their template library.
Roadmap exists because none of these solve the actual problem: getting competent, attorney-supervised legal work done at a price that doesn't require a board vote.
Side by Side
One table. No spin.
| Roadmap | Traditional Firm | ALSP | AI Tool | DIY Platform | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing | $500 flat per doc | $300–$3,400/hr | $130–$350/hr | $100–$300/seat/mo | $29–$49/mo + extras |
| Attorney review | Every document | Yes | Yes | No | Limited / add-on |
| AI-assisted | Yes, under attorney supervision | Rarely | Sometimes | Yes, unsupervised | Template-based |
| Attorney-client privilege | Full privilege | Full privilege | Depends | None | None |
| Turnaround | Hours, not weeks | Days to weeks | Days | Minutes | Self-serve |
| Negotiation support | Included in $500 | Billed hourly | Billed hourly | None | None |
| Dedicated Slack channel | Yes | No | Portal / email | No | No |
| Cost for 10 contracts | $5,000 | $20,000–$60,000+ | $10,000–$25,000 | $0 + your time + risk | $0 + your time + risk |
| Surprise bills | Never | Always | Often | N/A | Sometimes |
Deep Dives
How we stack up against each model
Traditional firms are built on the billable hour. That model rewards inefficiency — the longer a task takes, the more you pay. A senior associate at a top-50 firm bills $800–$1,400/hr. A partner can bill $2,000–$3,400/hr.
A routine NDA review that takes a Roadmap attorney 45 minutes could generate $2,000+ at a traditional firm because nobody has an incentive to work faster.
Firms are adopting AI internally, but they're not passing those savings to you. Rate increases are still 8–16% year over year. The AI makes the work faster; the bill stays the same or goes up.
Roadmap uses AI to work faster and charges you a flat rate. The efficiency gains go to you, not to our billable hours.
When they win
High-stakes litigation
If you're being sued for $50M and need a 40-person trial team, hire Cravath. That's not our game.
When we win
Everything else
Contracts, formation, employment docs, DPAs, vendor agreements, licensing, IP filings — the daily legal work that doesn't need a $2,000/hr partner.
Axiom, Lawtrades, and similar ALSPs deploy on-demand legal talent at $130–$350/hr. That's cheaper than a traditional firm, but it's still hourly. And it's still a staffing model — you're hiring a person, not buying an outcome.
An ALSP contract review for 10 documents at a mid-level rate of $250/hr, averaging 4 hours per document, costs you $10,000. The same work at Roadmap: $5,000. Flat. No time tracking. No scope creep.
ALSPs also don't always guarantee attorney-client privilege, depending on how the engagement is structured and who's doing the work. Roadmap is a law firm. Every engagement has privilege baked in.
When they win
Embedded team members
If you need a lawyer sitting in your office 40 hours a week as a quasi-employee, an ALSP secondment makes sense.
When we win
Outcome-based legal work
When you need documents reviewed, drafted, redlined, and executed — not a warm body filling a seat.
Spellbook, CoCounsel, Harvey, and similar tools charge $100–$1,000+ per user per month. They can draft and flag issues fast. But they don't provide attorney oversight. They don't negotiate with opposing counsel. And they don't create attorney-client privilege.
An AI tool is only as good as the person operating it. If that person is a founder with no legal training, you're generating confident-sounding documents that might have critical gaps. A Spellbook redline won't hold up if nobody reviewed the business terms. Harvey won't call opposing counsel to push back on an indemnity cap.
Roadmap uses AI too — the same caliber of models, running under zero-retention, SOC 2 Type II security. The difference: a licensed attorney reviews every output before it reaches you. AI speed with human judgment.
When they win
In-house legal teams
If you already have a GC and associate team, AI tools augment their existing judgment. Force multiplier for existing capability.
When we win
No in-house legal
If you don't have lawyers on staff — most startups and SMBs — the tool alone is a liability. You need the attorney, not just the software.
LegalZoom, Rocket Lawyer, and similar platforms are great for commoditized filings — LLC formation, trademark registration, basic templates. LegalZoom's Business Attorney Plan runs $39–$43/month and includes 30-minute attorney consultations and document reviews up to 10 pages.
But these platforms aren't built for the legal work that actually matters to growing businesses. Try negotiating a multi-party SaaS agreement through LegalZoom. Try getting a DPA reviewed for GDPR compliance. Try getting redline comments on a 40-page MSA for $39/month.
The moment your legal needs involve negotiation, nuance, or a counterparty with their own counsel, DIY platforms fall apart. The $299 you saved on formation gets wiped out by one bad contract clause.
When they win
Entity formation
If all you need is an LLC filed in Delaware, LegalZoom can do it for $0 + state fees. We can too, but this is their core product.
When we win
Real legal work
Contracts, negotiations, compliance, anything with a counterparty or regulatory exposure. The stuff you actually lose sleep over.
The Math
40 documents. One year. Four models.
A typical Series A startup processes 30–50 legal documents per year: NDAs, vendor agreements, employment contracts, SaaS agreements, DPAs, IP assignments. Here's what that costs.
| Model | 40 Docs / Year | Privilege? | Attorney Review? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Roadmap | $20,000 | Yes | Every document |
| Mid-tier firm ($400/hr) | $64,000–$96,000 | Yes | Yes |
| ALSP ($250/hr) | $40,000–$60,000 | Maybe | Yes |
| AI tool ($200/seat × 2) | $4,800 + your time + risk | No | No |
| DIY platform ($40/mo) | $480 + your time + risk | No | 10-page limit |
You save $44,000. That's a senior engineer for two months.
And that $20,000 includes negotiation support, redlining, and execution — not just the first-pass review. At a traditional firm, every round of negotiation is more billable hours. At Roadmap, it's the same $500.
What's Included
Every engagement. No exceptions.
- Licensed attorney review on every document, every time
- AI-powered first-pass analysis under attorney supervision — zero data retention, SOC 2 Type II compliant
- Dedicated Slack Connect channel — your attorney, your team, and our AI assistant in one place
- Full negotiation lifecycle — draft, review, redline, negotiate, execute. One fee.
- Attorney-client privilege on every communication, every document, every system
- Flat pricing — $500 per document. No hourly billing, no tiers, no surprise invoices.
Built For
Companies that move faster than their lawyers.
10–100+ contracts/year and can't justify a full-time GC
Need attorney-reviewed work, not templates or unsupervised AI
Want to budget legal costs in advance instead of getting surprise invoices
Move fast and need legal that keeps up — hours, not weeks
Prefer Slack over email chains, portals, and phone tag
Care about security and privilege, not just speed
If you're a 5-person startup that needs one NDA reviewed, we'll do it for $500 and you'll wonder why you ever considered paying a firm $3,000 for the same thing. If you're a 200-person company processing 80 contracts a quarter, we'll save you six figures a year.
Ready to stop
overpaying for legal?
$500 per document. Any contract, any practice area. From draft to signature.
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