Method, in plain words.

What this is

aiforlawyers is a public forum built from what lawyers already say in public: their posts and comments about AI tools, quoted verbatim, dated and linked back to the thread. We don't test tools and we don't sell placement. The numbers on Signals are a summary of those voices, a second layer for readers who want it; the voices come first.

By practice files each voice under the one task it is about. By where they work places a voice only when the community it was posted in is for that seat (r/biglaw, r/LawFirm for firm owners, r/paralegal) or when the post says it in its own words (“I work in-house”, “our small firm”); every other voice is “not stated”. By model files a voice under a model or version (GPT-4o, o3, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Gemini 2.x, Lexis+ AI Protégé) only when the post names it. Threads group voices from the same conversation.

Where the voices come from

Public posts from open communities where lawyers talk shop: Reddit (lawyer and law-school communities), Hacker News, Bluesky, Mastodon (including esq.social, a server for legal professionals), Lemmy and Stack Exchange Law. Today: Reddit 5788, Hacker News 530, Bluesky 199, Lemmy 37, Mastodon 14, Stack Exchange 3. Each source is read through the platform’s own public interface or a public archive of it, under its published terms; no logins, no private groups, nothing behind a paywall, and nothing that gets around a block. Trade press is news about tools, not a lawyer’s voice, so it is never counted. The record starts on Jan 1, 2023.

We keep the exact queries, sources lists and filters to ourselves. That is deliberate: a published recipe is an invitation to game the record (seed posts that match it) or to lift it wholesale. What we publish instead is everything you need to check us: every quote links to its original post, and every number carries its sample size and band.

Privacy: no names, links kept

We don’t show usernames or handles anywhere on the site: not on quotes, share pages, images or data files. A quote shows where it was said (the community) and when. The link to the original post stays, because a quote you cannot check is not worth publishing; some platforms put the author’s handle inside the post address, and that address is theirs, not ours. A build check fails the site if a handle or an email address appears anywhere else, and it is tested against deliberate leaks every time it runs. Wrote one of these posts and want it out? Tell us and it goes, logged on Corrections.

How a post becomes a voice

A language model reads each post with one fixed schema: is it an opinion or experience about an AI tool in legal work; which tool; which task; the sentiment (like, dislike, mixed, neutral); the main complaint; the main thing valued. Irrelevant posts are dropped; most posts we read are. One post is one voice, about one tool. The model or version is not guessed by the model: it is matched in the post’s own words, so you can check it against the quote.

How reliable is that? On Oct 22, 2026 we re-ran the classifier on 12 voices from the first round: same relevance in 11 of 12, same tool in 10 of 12, same sentiment in 7 of 12. Sentiment is the noisiest field, which is one more reason every number here carries a band.

How to read the numbers

Volume is usage, not quality. A tool that more people use gets more posts of every kind, including more complaints. ChatGPT has more voices than every legal tool together, so in raw numbers it collects the most criticism. That is why we show share of voice (each tool’s share of all voices on named tools, with a band) and every count per 100 voices, and why the main number, net, is already a rate: (like − dislike) / voices, from −100 to +100.

Every rate has a 90% band: the range the number would plausibly take with a different sample of the same size. Small samples get wide bands and are pulled toward zero, so a tool with one happy voice does not get a perfect score. Overlapping bands mean the order is not settled. Tools are numbered only from 10 voices; below that they are listed.

Change over time. Momentum compares the last 90 days with everything before; an arrow appears only when its band excludes zero and the move holds inside the main sources separately, so a change in who we hear from is not mistaken for a change of opinion. Models change under the same product name, so By model and By year show when each voice was posted.

Small samples and large ones

30 voices and 1,000 voices are not the same evidence, so every tool shows its number of voices and a confidence label (High from 300 voices, Medium from 60, Low from 10, Very low below) next to the width of its band. Rankings use the floor of the 90% band, not the average: the band comes from a Bayesian estimate that starts from “no opinion” and moves only as voices arrive. A tool with 12 happy voices has a high average and a low floor, so it sits below a tool with 400 mostly happy ones. The point value is still shown beside it.

Public ratings

Where a vendor publishes a star rating in its own public app listing, Ratings shows it with the number of ratings, the date we read it and a link. Those ratings are for the app, from every kind of user, and are shown beside our numbers, never mixed into them. Small counts are pulled toward the average of the group so that a handful of ratings cannot top the table. Review sites that block automated reading are not used.

Which model

By model has two layers. One is what the tool says it uses, taken only from the vendor’s or the model provider’s own pages, with the link and the date we read it; where there is no official statement it says so. The other is what lawyers name in their own words, with each model’s share of the posts naming a model of its family and its dislike rate per 100 posts, so a model people use more is not read as a worse one.

Events behind a change

Evolution splits sentiment and share of voice by quarter, per tool and per model. A change is marked only when the bands of two consecutive quarters do not overlap. Next to each mark we list the dated, sourced events around it (launches, model changes, studies, court orders). They are context: the data cannot show that an event caused a shift, and the page says so.

Quotes

Every quote is a verbatim span of a counted voice, trimmed only with [...]. A build check compares each quote with the stored text of the original post and fails the build if one does not match. We label a voice “Self-described lawyer” or “Says: works at a law firm” only when the quoted text itself says so; everything else is “Unverified voice”. One-line summaries in each tool’s voice table are written by the classifier and are not quotes.

Limits

This is what people choose to post, not a survey. Hacker News and Bluesky lean technical and press-adjacent; lawyer subreddits lean litigators and big-firm associates. Tools sold to large firms get fewer public posts. Prices are not shown until verified on the vendor’s own page. Nobody pays for position, and vendors can send corrections, which we log with the date on Corrections.

Independence: who pays, and what that cannot change

aiforlawyers is free to read and, today, earns nothing. If it earns, it will be from vendors who want to be on the page, and these rules are written before the first sale:

• Nobody pays for a rating. Net, bands, ranks, confidence labels and model figures are computed from public voices by one method, the same for every tool. No plan changes a number.
• Nobody pays for an order. Tables and the arena are ordered by the floor of the 90% band. A sponsor never appears inside a table, a ranking or a comparison.
• Nobody pays to hide a voice. We do not remove, soften or move a voice because a vendor asks. A voice leaves only through the author’s request or a factual correction, and each is logged with its date on Corrections, whoever asked.
• Sponsored means labelled. Anything paid carries the word “Sponsored”, sits apart from the record, and says who paid. The label cannot be bought off.
• Vendors can answer. A verified vendor can reply under a quote. The reply is labelled as the vendor’s and never replaces the quote.
• Same record for buyers of reports. A market report is built from the public record and sold to anyone. A buyer cannot choose a different cut or ask for a different result.

The offers are on For vendors, marked as proposals; none is on sale. If we ever break one of these rules, it goes on Corrections.

Use and cite

The numbers are ours to give away. Counts, rates, shares and bands on every page, and in index.json, are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0: credit “aiforlawyers.app (AI Vortex)”, the page, its date and a link. For example: aiforlawyers.app (AI Vortex), Index of legal AI tools, updated Oct 26, 2026. The data file carries aggregates only: no posts, no links to posts, no handles.

Quotes are not ours. Each one belongs to the person who wrote it; quote it with the link to the original post, which every quote here carries. Every number moves when the record does, so cite the date shown in the header of the page you read.

Freshness

The record is refreshed daily. The date in the header of every page is the date of the data. Last classification: Oct 26, 2026.

Who built this

aiforlawyers is built by Manuel Ayala at AI Vortex, an independent practice that helps law firms decide where AI does the work and where people keep the judgement.