Casetext Migration Guide: Replace Every Feature

Casetext no longer exists as a product you can buy. Thomson Reuters acquired it in August 2023 for 650 million dollars in cash, casetext.com began redirecting to a CoCounsel page on February 1, 2025, and access to CoCounsel 1.0 on the Casetext platform ended on March 31, 2025. Every Casetext feature either moved into the Westlaw and CoCounsel stack or was retired outright: SmartCite gave way to KeyCite, Parallel Search and CARA A.I. did not survive as separate named tools, and the self-serve credit-card purchase that made Casetext attractive to solos is gone. If you are only dealing with this now, your data is a support ticket, not a download button.

This guide is the practical version: what each Casetext feature became, what to do about your data, and how to choose a replacement without signing a multi-year enterprise contract you did not want. For the background on why any of this happened, we cover it separately in what happened to Casetext.

What replaced each Casetext feature

Casetext was really four products in one subscription: a case law database, a citator, a semantic search engine, and a brief analyzer, with CoCounsel bolted on at the end. They did not all land in the same place.

The single most consequential row is the last one. Casetext's appeal to solos and two-lawyer firms was never only the technology. It was that you could sign up on a Tuesday without talking to anyone. That is what the acquisition took away, and it is why so much of the search traffic around Casetext is people looking for a replacement rather than a migration path.

Can I still get my data out of Casetext?

Not on your own. The platform stopped serving its own interface, so there is no export screen to log into. Anything still recoverable has to come through Thomson Reuters customer support, and the honest answer is that recovery gets less likely the further you are from the 2025 cutoffs.

Thomson Reuters did publish a CoCounsel 2.0 migration page describing what carried across and what firm administrators had to move themselves. That URL no longer resolves; we checked it in August 2026 and it returns a 404. So if you are reconstructing what happened to your firm's material, do not rely on secondhand summaries of a page that is no longer public. Open a ticket and ask Thomson Reuters directly, in writing, three specific questions: whether any Casetext-era account data is still retained, whether uploaded documents and databases were migrated to a CoCounsel workspace your firm still controls, and whether anything shared with you by another firm survived the move.

The general lesson for any vendor change is to export while you still have a login, which is the first step in our guide to switching legal research providers. The practical assumption to work from is that nothing carried over automatically beyond what someone at your firm actively migrated before March 31, 2025. If your Casetext seats went unused during the transition window, treat that material as gone and rebuild from your own document management system, which is where the underlying files should have lived anyway.

What is the best Casetext citator replacement?

It depends on whether you need editorial treatment flags or just citing references, and the gap between those two things is bigger than most people expect. SmartCite generated its signals by analyzing how later courts cited a case. KeyCite and Shepard's do that too, but they add editorial judgment from staff attorneys, which is what you are paying for at the enterprise tier.

Your options, cheapest first. Many state bars include a Fastcase or vLex library in annual dues, which carries the Authority Check citator; if yours does, you already have a citator and may not know it. CourtListener, from the nonprofit Free Law Project, holds more than nine million decisions and covers essentially all precedential published US case law after it absorbed the Harvard Caselaw Access Project data in March 2024, and it shows Authorities and Cited By lists, but it has no editorial treatment flags at all. That is the honest limitation, and we lay it out in our CourtListener comparison. KeyCite requires Westlaw at a tier that includes it, and Shepard's is included on the self-serve LexisNexis tiers.

Whichever you land on, the discipline matters more than the brand. Run the treatment check as its own deliberate step rather than assuming your search surfaced a problem, and re-run it before filing rather than only when you first found the case. Our guide on checking whether a case is still good law covers what the signals actually mean, and citation check shows how we handle it.

What happened to Parallel Search?

It did not survive as a named product. Parallel Search was Casetext's sentence-level semantic search: you pasted a sentence stating a proposition and it returned passages from cases expressing the same idea in different words, which was genuinely different from running terms and connectors. Thomson Reuters absorbed Casetext's technology into CoCounsel rather than keeping the standalone tools, so there is no button labeled Parallel Search to go find.

The capability itself is no longer scarce, which is the useful part. Semantic and plain-language case law search is now table stakes across the category, including in tools that cost a fraction of what an enterprise seat runs. If Parallel Search is what you actually miss, you are looking for a search engine that understands a proposition rather than a keyword, and you have more options than you did in 2023. Our comparison of Boolean versus natural language legal search covers when terms and connectors still win.

What does CoCounsel cost compared with Casetext?

Thomson Reuters does not publish a price for CoCounsel Legal, so any specific number you see quoted is someone's estimate rather than a rate card. What is verifiable is the shape of the change. Casetext sold per-seat monthly subscriptions you could buy yourself. CoCounsel Legal is grounded in Westlaw and Practical Law content, is sold through a quote process, and typically lands on a multi-year term. For a solo who was paying for one Casetext seat, that is a different kind of purchase entirely, not just a higher number.

The product has kept moving, and it is worth knowing where it stands before you evaluate it. CoCounsel passed one million users in February 2026, three years after launching as the first AI legal assistant. In June 2026 Thomson Reuters opened early access to a next-generation CoCounsel Legal, rebuilt from the ground up on Anthropic's Claude Agent SDK, with general availability planned for August 2026 in the United States and rollouts in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia to follow. The company did not specify pricing for it. If you are being quoted today, ask explicitly which version you are buying and what happens to your price when the next generation becomes generally available.

We break down what the whole category actually costs in legal research software pricing, and compare our own approach directly in Casesearch vs CoCounsel.

How to choose a replacement without repeating the mistake

The lesson of the Casetext shutdown is not that AI legal research was a bad bet. It is that the thing which made Casetext valuable to small firms, self-serve purchase at a published price, is exactly the thing an acquirer has the least reason to preserve. So weight your evaluation toward the properties that survive a change of ownership.

• A published price you can read without a call. If the price is only available by quote, you have no way to know whether it moves next year.
• Month-to-month or annual, not three years. Long terms are where firms get stranded when a product direction changes.
• Cited authority, always. Every proposition should come back with the case and the pinpoint so you can open it yourself. This is not optional in legal work.
• A real treatment signal. Search without a citator is half a tool, and it is the half that gets people sanctioned.
• Data you can export. Ask, before you sign, how you get your work product out. Casetext users learned this one the expensive way.
• Security evidence on request. Ask any vendor for a current SOC 2 Type II report before client documents go near it, which is the same kind of control mapping a corporate client will ask your own firm to produce.

If your firm fits the profile Casetext served, a solo or a small litigation shop that needs real case law with citations and cannot justify an enterprise seat, that is the market we built for. Our side-by-side is on the Casetext alternative page, and there is more on the tradeoffs in the best AI legal research tools for small firms.

A migration checklist

If you are still untangling this, work through it in this order. It takes an afternoon.

1. Open a Thomson Reuters support ticket asking, in writing, what Casetext-era data is still retained for your account and whether any of it can be produced.
2. Pull your own record of what lived in Casetext: saved research, uploaded briefs, shared databases, and anything a colleague shared with you.
3. Check whether your state bar membership already includes a Fastcase or vLex library. Many do, and it is the cheapest citator you will find.
4. Decide whether you actually need editorial treatment flags or whether citing references are enough for your practice. This single question drives most of the cost difference.
5. Trial two replacements on the same real question from a live matter, not a demo question. Compare the citations they return, not the prose.
6. Before signing anything, confirm the term length, the renewal price, and the export path in writing.

Rebuilding a research workflow is annoying, but it is a better use of an afternoon than discovering mid-brief that the citator you assumed you had went away sixteen months ago.