Westlaw Free Trial: 7 Days, What You Get, and Pricing After

Thomson Reuters offers a 7-day Westlaw free trial that gives you all the premium features and content, and it does not ask for a credit card. In its own words: "We don't ask for credit card numbers or any payment information for a free trial," and "You won't be billed until you sign up for a subscription." Separate trial pages exist for Westlaw Advantage, Westlaw Edge, Westlaw Edge with AI-Assisted Research and Practical Law. When the week ends, the published price for the current product is $256.75 per month for a single circuit or $399.75 for all states plus federal, for new customers at firms of up to ten attorneys.

Seven days is not very long to evaluate a platform you may be signing a three-year contract for. Most people spend the first two days learning where things are and the last two forgetting they still have access. This is what the trial actually covers, what it does not, what happens to the price afterward, and how to run the week so it answers a real question.

How do I get a Westlaw free trial?

You request it through a trial form on the Thomson Reuters site rather than signing up self-serve. Each product has its own trial page, so the first decision is which product you are actually trialing. Westlaw Advantage is the current generation, launched August 13, 2025 as the successor to Westlaw Precision. Westlaw Edge and Westlaw Edge with AI-Assisted Research are the prior generation and still have live trial pages. Practical Law, the know-how and template library, is a different product with its own trial, and unlike CoCounsel it has a published Practical Law rate card running from $230.75 to $403 per attorney per month.

The form asks for your name, firm, email, phone and a physical address, and it will not take a P.O. box. It also asks what kind of organization you are, and the list is broad: law firms of various sizes, corporations, government agencies, academic institutions and pro se individuals. That breadth matters if you are a solo or not practising at a firm, because it means you are not filtered out at the form.

Expect contact. A trial request is a sales lead, and Thomson Reuters staffs it during business hours, weekdays 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. ET. That is not a criticism, it is just worth knowing before you use a personal phone number.

How long is the Westlaw free trial and what does it include?

Seven days. Thomson Reuters describes it as access "for a 7-day period, giving you all the premium features and content", so the trial is not a stripped-down tier. Within the window you should be able to reach the citator, the headnotes and key number system, secondary sources and the AI research tools that belong to whichever product you requested.

The limit that catches people is not features, it is time. Seven days is enough to test whether a platform answers your questions, and not enough to see how it behaves across a real matter with a real deadline. Plan for that rather than discovering it on day six.

Does the Westlaw free trial require a credit card?

No. Thomson Reuters states it does not ask for credit card numbers or any payment information for a free trial, and that you will not be billed until you sign up for a subscription. There is no silent conversion at the end of day seven. The trial stops and you decide separately whether to buy, which is a genuinely better arrangement than the auto-converting trials common elsewhere in software.

The commitment risk moves later in the process, to the subscription contract rather than the trial. That is where the multi-year terms and renewal clauses live, and it deserves the attention people usually spend worrying about trial billing.

What does Westlaw cost after the free trial?

Thomson Reuters publishes exactly two Westlaw prices, and both are Westlaw Advantage: $256.75 per month for single circuit coverage and $399.75 per month for all states plus federal. A two-year term takes 12% off and a three-year term takes 18% off, which brings the single circuit plan to roughly $210.54 a month. Online pricing is limited to new customers at firms of up to ten attorneys, and most customers get access within one business day of signing up.

Everything else is a quote. Westlaw Edge carries no published price, nor does Westlaw Advantage with CoCounsel Essentials, nor does any configuration for a firm above ten attorneys, nor does any renewal. If a comparison article gives you a precise monthly figure for Edge or for Westlaw Classic, that number did not come from Thomson Reuters this year. We keep the current numbers, the term arithmetic and the out-of-plan charges in one place on our Westlaw pricing breakdown.

One cost the trial will never show you is the out-of-plan charge, because during a trial you are not on a plan. Under the Thomson Reuters pricing guidelines for commercial plans effective January 1, 2017, opening a document your subscription does not cover costs $25.00 for primary law, $69.00 for a secondary source and $125.00 for briefs and arbitration materials, billed per document viewed rather than per search. A trial on full premium access can therefore feel unlimited in a way your actual subscription will not, which is the single biggest reason a trial flatters a platform. Our breakdown of whether Westlaw charges per search takes that billing model apart.

How to make a 7-day legal research trial actually tell you something

Bring real work. The demo questions a salesperson suggests are chosen because the platform answers them well. The only test that predicts anything is a question you have already researched, on a matter you know the answer to, in the jurisdiction you actually practise in.

A workable plan for the week:

• Day one: run three questions you researched in the last month and compare what comes back against what you found and eventually cited.
• Day two: take a case you know has been treated badly by later courts and check whether the citator surfaces that clearly, and how fast.
• Day three: search a narrow, unglamorous issue in your own state. Broad constitutional questions make every platform look good.
• Day four: test the coverage you are being sold. If you are quoted single circuit, deliberately try something out of circuit and see what happens.
• Day five: hand it to whoever actually does the research in your office, which is often a paralegal or associate rather than the person signing.
• Days six and seven: write down what it did better than what you use now, in specifics, not impressions.

Check the AI output against sources rather than reading it as an answer. The only independent measurement of the previous generation of these tools, Stanford RegLab's preregistered study published in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, found Westlaw AI-Assisted Research accurate on 42% of test queries with a 33% hallucination rate, and Lexis+ AI accurate on 65% with 17% hallucinated. Both products tested have since been replaced, so those figures describe what was measured in 2024 rather than what is sold now. They are still the only independent numbers anyone has, and a trial is the right moment to run your own version of that test.

Free trials for the alternatives

Trial a competitor in the same week if you can. Comparing two platforms against the same questions is far more useful than comparing one platform against your memory of another.

Before you count on the bar association route, confirm what your bar actually provides this year. "Free through your bar" no longer automatically means Fastcase: Decisis, launched by LexisNexis parent RELX in 2021, has been winning that business and now holds partnerships with fourteen state bars, and the Wyoming State Bar switched from Fastcase to Decisis effective November 1, 2024. Clio also closed its $1 billion acquisition of vLex, which owns Fastcase, on November 10, 2025. Our comparison of Westlaw alternatives sets out what each option gives up.

What to check before the trial turns into a contract

The trial is the cheap part. The contract is where the money is, and legal research agreements are typically multi-year with an evergreen auto-renewal clause requiring written notice, commonly somewhere between thirty and ninety days before the term ends. Read your own agreement for the exact number rather than assuming a vendor-wide rule. Miss the window and the next term is decided for you.

Three things worth settling in writing before you sign, while you still have the leverage a prospect has and a renewing customer does not:

• Coverage. Single circuit versus all states is a $143 a month difference. Buy for the jurisdictions you actually searched during the trial, not the ones you might.
• Out-of-plan behaviour. Ask what happens when someone opens a document outside the plan, whether you can cap or block it, and whether you get an alert.
• The renewal number. The published price is a new-customer price. Ask now what year two looks like, because you will not be able to use the configurator then.

Then track the line item like any other recurring cost. Firms that get an alert before a recurring subscription renews tend to reach the renewal conversation with a decision already made rather than a deadline already missed. Diary the notice date the day you sign, not the month it falls due.

If you are running the trial because you are already unhappy with what you have, treat the evaluation and the exit as one project. Our guide to switching legal research providers covers notice mechanics, what exports cleanly and what does not, and our LexisNexis pricing breakdown gives you the other side's published numbers to bring to the table. LexisNexis runs its trials differently too, and our guide to the LexisNexis free trial sets out which offer you actually get and who the terms exclude.

The short version

The Westlaw free trial is seven days, covers full premium features and content, needs no credit card and does not auto-convert. It is a genuinely low-risk way to look at the platform. The risk sits one step later, in a multi-year agreement whose renewal price is not published and whose out-of-plan charges the trial cannot show you. Use the week on real questions in your real jurisdiction, price the alternatives while you are at it, and settle the coverage and renewal terms before you sign rather than after.