Conflict check software for mid-size law firms: what each platform costs and which tier hides it

Conflict check software is almost never sold as a product with its own price. In the US legal market it is a feature gated behind a tier, which means the real cost of running conflict checks is the price of the upgrade multiplied by every seat in the firm, including the seats that will never run one. For a ten attorney firm on MyCase, that mechanism costs $9,600 a year. Prices below were read from vendor pricing pages on the dates shown.

That distinction matters most to mid-size firms, because they are the ones large enough to need a defensible conflicts process and small enough that a per seat upgrade across thirty people is a real budget line. Solos rarely hit the gate. Large firms buy dedicated risk systems. Everyone in between pays for conflict checking through a tier they may not otherwise need.

How much does conflict check software cost?

There is no standalone price for conflict checking at any major US legal platform we could verify. Every vendor bundles it into practice management or a legal CRM, so you buy a tier and the conflict check arrives with it. Published tier prices run from $49 to $150 per user per month, and about half the category publishes no figure at all.

The table below is the honest state of it, with read dates attached to every figure.

MyCase puts conflict check tracking on its top tier only

MyCase is the clearest example of the gate, and the only one where the cost can be calculated exactly, because MyCase publishes its rates. Read on 13 August 2026, it sells three tiers at $50, $100 and $130 per user per month billed annually, or $60, $120 and $150 billed monthly. Conflict Check Tracking is named on the Advanced tier and only on Advanced.

Run that through a mid-size firm. A ten seat firm that would otherwise sit on the $50 Basic tier has to move all ten seats to $130 to get conflict checking. That is $80 per user per month, or $9,600 a year, and on monthly billing it is $10,800. Nobody at MyCase describes this as the price of conflict checking, but arithmetically that is exactly what it is, because there is no other route to the feature.

The part that stings for a mid-size firm is that conflict checks are typically run by a small number of people. Intake staff and the responsible partner run them; the associates and paralegals filling out the rest of the seat count mostly do not. You are still buying the upgrade for all of them. Our MyCase pricing breakdown carries the full tier by tier feature record behind that number.

Lawmatics splits basic and advanced conflict checking across tiers

Lawmatics does something subtler and, for a buyer, more annoying: it gates the quality of the conflict check rather than its existence. Reading the Lawmatics plan comparison on 9 September 2026, Essential includes conflict checking described as Basic, and Premium includes conflict checking described as Advanced. Neither term is defined on the page.

That is a hard thing to evaluate before you buy, and it is worth pushing on in the demo. Ask what Basic actually searches. The questions that matter are whether it checks former clients as well as current ones, whether it covers opposing parties and related entities rather than just the named client, whether it matches on spelling variants, and whether it produces a dated, exportable record you could show a bar committee. A conflicts search that only matches exact strings against active clients is not a conflicts system.

Lawmatics publishes no price at all, which we re-confirmed twice on 9 September 2026. The only dollar figure anywhere on its pricing page is a $50 gift card offered for taking a demo. It does publish a three user minimum on Essential and Premium and five on Enterprise, so there is no solo or two person configuration whatever the per seat rate turns out to be. The other Essential limits are worth knowing before you assume it is the cheap way in: 500 contacts, ten automations, fifty e-signatures, fifty SMS a month, and no email sending at all. We keep the full record on our Lawmatics pricing page.

Smokeball does not name a conflict check at all

Smokeball sells four plans, publishes no price for any of them as of 20 August 2026, and does not name a conflict check among the features listed on its pricing page. That is not evidence the product lacks one. It is evidence you cannot confirm it from the published material, which for a compliance-driven purchase is the same practical problem: you cannot shortlist on it.

Treat any platform that will not put the conflicts feature in writing as unverified rather than absent, and get the answer in the quote rather than the demo. Demos are routinely run on the top tier.

Why the directory price ranges for this category disagree with each other

If you have been researching this, you have probably hit numbers that do not reconcile, and it is worth knowing why before you plan a budget around them. Comparison directories covering conflict checking currently publish per attorney subscription ranges, per check fees and monthly platform ranges that conflict with each other and, in several cases, with the vendors own pages.

We checked a sample of them against source. One widely syndicated figure puts Clio Manage at $39 per user per month; Clio own published entry rate is $49. Another circulates a per user rate for Lawmatics, which publishes no rate. A third quotes roughly $300 a month for Lead Docket, a figure that appears nowhere on any Filevine or Lead Docket page. Some of these come from stale reads and some appear to be estimates that acquired authority by repetition.

The practical rule: treat any price you did not read on the vendor own page, on a date you can name, as a rumor. That applies to this article too, which is why every figure here carries the date it was read.

What a mid-size firm should ask before buying

Conflict checking is bought once and audited for years, so the questions that matter are about the record it leaves, not the search box.

• Which tier is the conflict check on, and what is the total annual cost of putting every seat on that tier?
• Does the search cover former clients, opposing parties, related entities and prospects who never became clients?
• Does it match on spelling variants and alternate names, or only exact strings?
• Does it produce a dated, exportable record of who ran the check and what it returned?
• Does it run at intake, before anyone has spent time on the matter, or only after a file is opened?
• Is the check available through an API, or only in the interface?

That last pair is where most systems disappoint. A conflict check that only runs after a matter is opened has already let the risk in the door, because by then someone has taken the call and heard the facts. The check belongs at the point of first contact.

It is also worth being clear-eyed that a conflicts search is only as good as the records it can reach. Most firms keep matter history scattered across email, shared drives, document stores and a practice management database that only knows about opened files, and a conflict database that reads one of those four will miss what is in the others. If the underlying problem is that nobody can find anything across those systems, a search layer that indexes everything your team stores solves a different problem than a conflicts product does, and firms sometimes buy the wrong one of the two.

Running the check where the risk actually enters

We built our intake around that timing point. The qualifying conversation happens before anyone at the firm has spent time on the matter, so the party names are captured and checked at first contact rather than at file opening, and the result is a dated record attached to the inquiry whether or not it ever becomes a client. Prospects who never opened a file are exactly the population most conflict systems forget, and exactly the one that causes problems later.

Our pricing is planned rather than purchasable today, at an intended $49, $129 and $299 per firm per month, priced per firm rather than per seat. We would rather say that here than after a demo. If the per seat gate described above is your real problem, per firm pricing is the structural answer to it, and you can join the waitlist now.

For the full vendor by vendor record, see our conflict check software comparison, which tracks what each platform publishes and when we last read it. If you are evaluating the wider intake stack rather than conflicts alone, our submission intake automation pricing comparison covers how each platform meters and bills, and legal software pricing is the pillar for the whole category.