August

What it is

August is a legal AI platform built for law firms of roughly 5 to 150 lawyers — the segment that Harvey and Legora price out and that general chat assistants under-serve on workflow. It was founded in New York in 2023 by Rutvik Rau (CEO), Thomas Bueler-Faudree and Joseph Parker, who met in a Columbia machine-learning lab, and raised a $7M seed in August 2025 led by NEA and Pear VC. It most resembles Legora in shape: one platform rather than a set of point tools.

The surfaces are an Assistant for document Q&A, research and drafting; Tabular Review, which turns a document set into a grid (one row per document, one column per question) with a source citation in every cell, collaborative cell locking and comments; a Word add-in that applies firm playbooks and writes edits as tracked changes; an Outlook assistant for searching and drafting email; and a real-time deposition assistant. Playbooks are configured without code. August runs on several model providers — OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI are named — rather than one, and reports SOC 2 Type II and EU/US hosting options.

On 2026-09-29 it launched August for Agents: a company’s own operational agents (procurement, sales) send legal questions to the company’s chosen law firm through a service the firm builds on August. The firm’s agent answers inside categories the firm has authorized; anything else goes to a lawyer for approval. Firms package the work as defined-scope, fixed-price offerings and keep responsibility for the advice.

Why it shows up in Legal Ops stacks

• It sells to the mid-size firm on its own terms. August’s pitch is a flat monthly fee with unlimited queries and document hosting, plus a dedicated customer success manager and a forward-deployed engineer in every account regardless of firm size. Harvey and Legora reserve that level of hands-on configuration for much larger contracts.
• The work it does is document-heavy, not research-corpus work. Published customer results: Hicksons (Australia) reviewed 5,000 negligence files 90% faster; ELP (India) cut diligence time 60%. Those are Tabular Review and drafting wins.
• It now has a firmwide reference. Hughes Hubbard & Reed, an Am Law 150 firm with roughly $270M in revenue, chose August in March 2026 after a four-month evaluation and deployed it across practice groups and business functions (finance, billing, marketing). Other named customers include Harrison Drury, White Summers, Mission Australia and 20-lawyer Dunning Vallejo & MacDonald; the vendor reports 1,500+ users.
• It reads from where firms already file. Word, Outlook and SharePoint are native; iManage, NetDocuments, Google Drive and Dropbox connections were listed at the January 2026 launch.

Pricing reality

August launched self-serve sign-up in January 2026 at $375 per user per month or $4,000 per user per year, with a two-week trial and no card required; an Individual plan at $250 per month was published afterwards. As of 2026-10-06 that is gone: the pricing and sign-up pages return 404, every call to action is “Book a Demo”, and August’s own comparison page lists its trial as “requires onboarding engagement.” The current offer is a free live workflow built on your documents in under a week, then a flat-fee quote.

Use the published figures as the anchor: approx. $250–375 per user per month, or about $3,000–4,500 per user per year. A 20-lawyer firm should expect roughly $60K–90K a year before negotiation (estimate from the retired list prices, not a vendor quote). That puts August near Legora’s reported ~$3,000/user/year entry seat but without Legora’s 10-seat minimum, and far under Harvey’s reported $1,000–2,000 per seat per month.

Best for

Managing partners and legal-ops leads at firms of 5–150 lawyers, especially litigation-heavy or mixed-practice firms without an IT team, who want diligence, discovery summarization, deposition support and playbook redlining on one bill — and who want the vendor to configure it for them.

Not for: solo lawyers who want a card-swipe trial (that door closed), firms whose main need is citator-grade case-law research, or in-house teams buying for themselves (August for Agents is built for the firm side of that relationship).

Alternatives

• Harvey — pick it when you are Am Law 100 scale, need its agent library and procurement track record, and the per-seat price is not the gate.
• Legora — the fastest-growing challenger; pick it over August when you have 10+ transactional seats and EU-heavy work, and want a vendor with a $600M Series D behind the roadmap.
• Thomson Reuters CoCounsel — pick it when research grounded in Westlaw is the job, not document review.
• Claude for Legal — pick it when you have someone who can wire up your own connectors and you prefer a $20–30 seat plus usage over a flat fee.
• vLex Vincent AI — pick it when the firm already runs on Clio and wants AI attached to a research library.

Watch-outs

• Pricing went from published to quote-only inside nine months. Guard: get the flat fee, seat count, what “unlimited” excludes and the renewal uplift cap in writing; treat the retired $375/month list as your ceiling.
• It is a seed-stage vendor against rivals valued at $5.6B and $11B. Guard: keep iManage, NetDocuments or SharePoint as the system of record, confirm bulk export of playbooks and Tabular Review outputs, and sign a 12-month first term.
• August for Agents is days old. No customer has published results. Guard: pilot one narrow fixed-price package (NDA review, for example) with lawyer approval on every answer, and confirm with your malpractice carrier and engagement letter how agent-delivered advice is covered.
• Multi-model routing changes where data goes. Guard: ask which provider processes client documents by default, whether zero-retention terms apply to each, and pin EU hosting in the contract if you need it.