Software stack for a small law office
Three illustrative stacks, priced from rates read off each vendor's own page. At five people they run from $64.99 to $340.44 a month — and the expensive one is not the best one.
What shapes this business's software
Client confidentiality, retention measured in years, and a lot of documents that must be signed and kept. The constraint is rarely cost — it is being able to produce a file years later.
The three stacks at a glance
| Stack | 1 | 3 | 5 | 10 | 25 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lean | $20.99 | $42.99 | $64.99 | $129.98 | $324.95 |
| Practical | $88.99 | $110.99 | $156.99 | $281.98 | $656.95 |
| Feature-rich | $126.44 | $233.44 | $340.44 | $617.93 | $1,425.45 |
Lean — $64.99/month at five people
The least you can pay and still run the business properly. Free tiers where they genuinely work.
Deliberately not included at this size:
- A CRM. Matter management is a different category with its own vendors, and a general-purpose CRM usually fits it badly.
- Project management software, for the same reason — matters are not projects.
Practical — $156.99/month at five people
What most teams this size actually end up on, once free tiers stop fitting.
Deliberately not included at this size:
- Separate file storage. Microsoft 365 includes 1 TB of OneDrive per user even on Basic, which is more than most small practices use.
- Team chat, at this size — email plus a room covers it.
Feature-rich — $340.44/month at five people
More capability, and more cost. Not an upgrade — a different trade, and often the wrong one at this size.
- Microsoft 365 Business Standard with Copilot
- 1Password Teams Starter Pack
- IDrive Team
- Docusign Standard
- Intuit QuickBooks Online
Deliberately not included at this size:
- A scheduling tool, unless client intake volume genuinely justifies it — Microsoft Bookings is included and handles simple booking.
The thing generic stack advice misses here
The line worth reading before any price here is what happens on cancellation. Microsoft deletes data when a subscription ends, with no read-only period. For a practice with retention obligations that is a bigger risk than a monthly rate, and it argues for backup that is genuinely independent of the suite.
What this page is not
A recommendation. We have not run most of these products in a lab, and two businesses of the same type and size can have genuinely different right answers — the variable that matters most is how your team actually works, which no table can see. These are priced illustrations, good for checking whether your bill is in a sane range and for seeing what a tier deliberately leaves out.
To price what you actually pay for rather than an illustration, the stack auditor takes your real list and flags overlap, seat-minimum waste and what happens when somebody leaves. If your bill is well above the feature-rich row, the cause is usually paying twice for a capability you already own rather than one expensive mistake.
Other business types
- Consulting business
- Marketing agency
- Accounting or bookkeeping firm
- Solo consultant
- Real-estate team
- Construction or trades business
- Small nonprofit
Tell me when these prices change
Every figure on this page is recomputed when a tracked rate moves. Subscribers hear what changed, with the date and the source.