A Relativity, Everlaw or Logikcull alternative for a small firm’s matter

For a matter of a few thousand to a few tens of thousands of documents, reviewed by one person or a small team, Case loads the email and documents, finds the duplicates and the threads, searches them with Boolean and proximity searches, codes and redacts them, and produces them with Bates numbers and a Concordance DAT and Opticon OPT that Relativity and Everlaw import. It runs in the browser on your computer, so the documents stay there and there is no charge per gigabyte. It is part of OBSCURA Pro, not free. For a large matter, many reviewers working at once, or analytics and technology-assisted review, a hosted platform is still the right tool, and this page says where the line falls.

What the hosted platforms are

RelativityOne is the cloud version of Relativity, the platform much of the litigation-support industry is built on. It is sold by data volume, largely through service providers, and its strength is scale: very large matters, many reviewers, analytics, and a large ecosystem of people trained on it.

Everlaw is a cloud review platform that describes its pricing as based on the amount of data hosted, with unlimited users. It is often recommended to smaller firms as easier to learn than Relativity.

Logikcull, now part of Reveal, has been sold to small firms for longest, with storage-based and matter-based plans and an upload-and-review workflow that needs little training.

All three keep the matter on the vendor’s servers, which is what lets many people review the same documents at once and lets the vendor run analytics over them. It is also why their prices are measured in gigabytes and months: the vendor is storing the data for you. Prices are quoted to each firm and change, so none are given here; each vendor’s own pricing page is the place to check.

Side by side

The hosted platforms as they describe themselves, and Case as it is, on 30 September 2026. The hosted platforms do far more than one row can say; the table is about the jobs a small matter needs.

Sources, as read on 30 September 2026: the vendors’ own descriptions of their products and pricing, and their help pages on productions and load files. Where a cell says “on most”, it depends on the plan or the service provider.

What Case does

• Loads a matter by custodian. Mailboxes and folders are dropped on the Load screen and given control numbers with your prefix. An email’s attachments are numbered straight after it, in its family. A file that cannot be read is still listed, with the reason.
• Finds duplicates and threads. Every document gets a SHA-256 and an MD5. The same email saved from two mailboxes is recognised by what it says, not by the file it came in, and threads are rebuilt from Message-ID, In-Reply-To and References.
• Searches, and reports on the searches. steel w/5 delay, "site meeting", negligen*, from:hollis-law.example. The search term report gives each search’s documents, hits, families and unique documents, which is what is argued over when search terms are negotiated.
• Codes by key. Responsive, Not responsive, Privileged, Hot, Confidential and tags of your own, with notes, and a privilege screen that flags documents naming your lawyers or their firms’ domains for a person to check.
• Redacts and produces. Boxes on a PDF’s page or passages of any other document’s text, each with a reason, kept apart from the original. A production numbers every page, paints the redactions solid black into the pictures of the pages, takes redacted words out of the text files, and writes the DAT and OPT a receiving party loads.
• Keeps a record. Every load, coding change, redaction, production and merge goes into an audit trail, each entry chained to the one before it by SHA-256, and a chronology, a people map and exhibit bundles are built from the same documents.

Case’s own page has a short film of it at work on its sample, an invented construction dispute, and the full list of what it reads.

When a hosted platform is the right choice

• The matter is large. Case has been measured at 52,534 documents, loaded, indexed and analysed in about four minutes, and that is as far as it has been tested. Hundreds of thousands of documents belong on a platform built for them.
• Several reviewers need the same documents at once. Case has no server, so there is no shared database: a second reviewer is handed a copy, and their coding is merged back with every conflict shown. That works for two or three people; it is not a review team of twenty.
• You need AI. Near-duplicates, inclusive emails, active learning, clusters, concept search and categories are here, as classical arithmetic on the documents’ words in your browser; AI summaries and answers are not, because they would need a model and a server.
• The data is not email and office documents. Forensic images, chat exports, audio and video are not read, nor an old Office file protected with a password.
• Someone else should hold the data. With Case the documents are on your computer, and so are the backups. Clearing the browser’s data for the site clears the case, so the case file has to be saved, as any desktop program’s file would be.

Why keeping it on your computer matters for a small matter

A small matter has the same obligations as a large one and a smaller budget. With a hosted platform, the cost of review depends on how much data is collected and how long it stays, and a client’s documents sit with another company, under its security and its terms. With Case, the documents are read in the browser tab, in workers of its own, and kept in the browser’s storage on your disk. Nothing about them reaches this site; the only thing its server ever sees is the Pro key.

The productions still go to the other side in the form they expect. The load files are the Concordance DAT and Opticon OPT that Relativity, Everlaw and Concordance import, so a party on a hosted platform loads a Case production as it would any other.

What it costs

Case on its own is US$2 a month or US$19 a year; all of OBSCURA Pro is US$5 a month or US$48 a year. Each comes with 7 days free first. The price does not change with the size of the matter or how long it is kept. For a team, each person needs a plan of their own. Pro also covers PDF Studio and the site’s other paid applications. There is no free version of Case with features held back: without Pro, its page shows what it does and asks for a plan.

See it before you pay. Case’s page shows it at work on the sample and lists, before anything else, what it cannot do yet.