Free alternatives · Industry and professional
ContractReviewDesk
An AI workspace that helps Indian lawyers review contracts, draft and research, and checks every citation in an AI draft before the lawyer relies on it.
A free alternative to Legora, built by Surge Software. Free. You pay only what third-party services cost us, at cost.
Live at contractreviewdesk.com
Walkthrough
See ContractReviewDesk in action
The problem
What it solves for a business
For: Advocates at small and mid-size Indian law firms, and in-house legal teams reviewing vendor and employment contracts.
- Global legal AI tools are priced per seat in dollars, sold through sales calls, and often need 10 or more seats.
- General AI tools can produce plausible Indian case citations that do not exist, and courts treat citing them as misconduct.
- Indian research databases have the law but not the workflow: Word redlines, tabular review, matters and stamp-duty checks.
How it works
ContractReviewDesk, step by step
- 01
Open a matter
Create a matter and upload contracts and files to an encrypted vault (DOCX, PDF, TXT).
- 02
Run a playbook
Run a vendor MSA, MSME supply or employment playbook to get draft findings with the Indian authority behind each rule.
- 03
Review the redlines
Accept, reject or edit each suggested change and download a Word file with real tracked changes.
- 04
Ask and research
Ask questions of the matter's documents or of the statutes and judgments corpus; answers cite numbered sources.
- 05
Citation check
Every citation and quote in an AI draft is checked against the source corpus; anything not found is struck out and flagged for the lawyer.
Comparison
ContractReviewDesk vs Legora
| ContractReviewDesk | Legora | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free. You pay only what third-party services cost us, at cost. | About $250 per seat per month (estimate), sales-led, annual |
| Seat minimum | None; unlimited users | About 10 seats (estimate) |
| Indian statutes and judgments | Built-in seed corpus (47 sections, 37 Supreme Court judgments) plus tools to load more | Not shown publicly |
| Citation checking | Checks citations, case names, sections and quotes against the corpus; unfound ones are struck out | Partial |
| Stamp duty and registration | Indicative state checklists and calculator (12 states) | No |
| Court-filing format checks | SC, Delhi HC and generic HC profiles | No |
| On-prem or air-gapped | Yes, with external AI disabled | No (regional cloud) |
| Word redlines and tabular review | Yes | Yes |
Legora details are taken from its public website and may have changed since (About $250 per seat per month, estimate, not public; about 10-seat minimum (researched 24 Oct 2026)).
Why switch
Advantages over Legora
No seat minimum, public price
A single advocate can start without a card. Legora is sales-led with an estimated 10-seat minimum.
Citations checked before you see them
Citations and quotes the corpus cannot confirm are struck out and flagged, and overruled cases trigger a warning.
Indian practice checks
Stamp-duty and registration checklists and court-filing format checks, which the competitive matrix found in none of the rivals.
Can run on your own server
An on-prem install can run with all external AI switched off, so documents stay on the firm's machine.
Features
What it does today
- Encrypted document vault per workspace with matter workspaces, comments, assignees and roles
- Playbook contract review (3 India playbooks, 20+ rules) with tracked-change redlines in Word
- Tabular review and due-diligence checklists where every answer carries a word-for-word quote from the document; CSV export
- Ask the documents: answers about a matter's own files, citing the passages they come from
- Citation verifier for SCC, AIR, SCR, INSC and SCC OnLine citations, case names, sections and quotes, plus warnings when an overruled case is cited
- Drafting from 4 templates and a 13-clause Indian-law clause library, with DOCX export
- Indicative stamp duty and registration checklists for 12 states, and court-filing format checks for Supreme Court, Delhi HC and generic HC profiles on .docx files
- Hash-chained audit log with CSV export; on-prem install option with external AI switched off
Use cases
How teams use ContractReviewDesk
Vendor MSA review
An in-house counsel runs the vendor MSA playbook and sends the vendor a Word file with tracked changes after checking each finding.
Due diligence grid
An associate asks the same 10 questions of a deal's contracts and checks each answer against its quoted clause.
Checking a brief
A lawyer pastes a draft brief to see which citations could not be found or point to a different case.
Filing preparation
A junior checks a Supreme Court filing's page size, margins, font and annexure marking before submission.
Under the hood
Where AI is used, and where it is not
The model
Qwen (qwen3.8-27b) on Surge's own GPU server first; Claude Sonnet only when the local answer errors, times out or fails a check and the workspace has prepaid credit. With no AI keys, a rules-only extractive mode runs.
Rules and code
Code checks JSON shape, verifies every citation and section against the corpus, rejects quotes that are not word-for-word in the source, applies playbook rules and computes stamp-duty figures.
People in the loop
Every finding, redline, draft, stamp figure and filing check is a draft for a qualified advocate to verify. ContractReviewDesk is a tool for lawyers and does not give legal advice.
Book a working session
A working session with our architects on one of your use cases. You bring a process and sample documents; we leave you with a scoped plan: model, hosting, integrations, timeline and cost range.