What's the Difference Between LeanLaw's Core, Pro, Contingency, and Elite Plans?

LeanLaw publishes four plans: Core at $55 per user per month, Pro at $75, and two custom-quoted tiers, Contingency and Elite. Core covers time and expense tracking, trust accounting, and QuickBooks Online sync. Pro adds LEDES billing and matter-based accounting. Contingency and Elite build out settlement and compensation tools.

What’s actually in each plan

Core, at $55 per user per month, includes time and expense tracking, e-payments, a reporting dashboard, trust accounting (IOLTA), professional invoices, and two-way QuickBooks Online sync.

Pro, at $75 per user per month, includes everything in Core plus three custom invoice templates, LEDES files, precise user permissions, and matter-based accounting.

Contingency is custom-quoted and includes Settlement Wizard, lien management and tracking, automated settlement statements, Contingency Insights (case profitability), and native QuickBooks Online sync.

Elite is also custom-quoted and includes everything in Core, Pro, and Contingency, plus unlimited invoice templates, priority support and a dedicated manager, custom reporting, and compensation tracking. All four plans are available month-to-month, and every plan opens with a 14-day trial that doesn’t require a credit card. A one-time onboarding fee may apply depending on your plan and firm size.

Read that list closely and the four plans nest rather than run in parallel: Pro is Core plus a specific set of additions, and Elite is Core, Pro, and Contingency plus a further set on top of all three. Contingency is the one that sits slightly outside that ladder, since it’s built around settlement and lien work an hourly or flat-fee firm may never touch at all, rather than being a bigger version of Core or Pro.

Why the jump from Pro to Elite looks so big

Core and Pro are priced per seat because the work they cover is the same shape for almost every firm doing it: someone logs time, someone reviews a bill, someone reconciles trust. Say a five-attorney firm sits on Pro. That’s $75 × 5 = $375 per user per month before any onboarding fee, a number you can check against your own headcount in your head. (If you’re weighing exactly what counts as a user for that math, that’s worth reading on its own.)

Ask what Elite costs the same firm and there isn’t a comparable multiplication to do, because Contingency and Elite aren’t priced per seat against a fixed list — they’re quoted against what a specific firm needs from a bundle that includes settlement tooling, custom reporting, and compensation tracking. The size of the jump from Pro’s published rate to Elite’s “custom” isn’t padding on the price. It reflects that Elite is assembled around a firm’s situation rather than sold off a shelf, the way Core and Pro are.

Which plan fits which kind of firm

The four inclusion lists sort roughly by what kind of work a firm does and how it gets paid for it. A firm billing purely hourly, with no need for LEDES files, granular permissions, or matter-based accounting, can run entirely on Core. Add any one of those three requirements and Pro is the plan built to have them — a firm that bills a corporate client requiring LEDES files, for instance, isn’t a Core firm regardless of headcount, because Core doesn’t include LEDES at any size.

A firm that takes on contingency or settlement work at all needs to be looking at Contingency instead, since none of its lien tracking, contingency fee calculation, or case-profitability tools live in Core or Pro. And a firm asking specifically about compensation tracking, unlimited invoice templates, or a dedicated manager is really describing Elite, whether or not that’s the plan name it started the conversation with.

Firm size threads through this differently than the capability list does. A three-attorney firm with straightforward hourly billing rarely outgrows Core on headcount alone; what pushes it to Pro is usually a specific client requirement, like LEDES, not the roster getting longer. A firm with fifteen or more timekeepers, multiple offices, or a mix of hourly, flat-fee, and contingency work in the same practice is the more typical Elite conversation, less because of any one capability and more because a custom reporting and dedicated-support relationship starts to make sense once a firm is running that many moving parts at once.

What this depends on

• Whether your firm bills hourly, flat fee, or contingency work, since that decides whether Contingency’s settlement tools are relevant at all.
• Whether you need LEDES billing, precise user permissions, or matter-based accounting, all of which start at Pro.
• Firm size and operational complexity, since Contingency and Elite are quoted rather than listed at a flat rate.
• Whether a one-time onboarding fee applies for your plan and firm size, and what that fee’s scope turns out to be.

The question worth asking before the call

Most firms don’t need to choose among four abstract tiers so much as they need to name the one or two capabilities above that they’re currently missing — a LEDES-compliant invoice for a corporate client, a settlement statement that doesn’t live in a spreadsheet, a permissions setup that keeps billing rates away from the wrong desk. Name the gap first, and the plan question mostly answers itself.

Related questions

What is the difference between the Pro and the Core plan? Pro includes everything in Core plus three custom invoice templates, LEDES files, precise user permissions, and matter-based accounting, for $75 per user per month against Core’s $55.

Can you walk me through the pricing tiers and the rates for each? There are four published plans now: Core at $55 per user per month, Pro at $75, and Contingency and Elite, both custom-quoted based on what a firm needs from them.

Why is there such a price gap between Pro and Elite — what’s actually in Elite? Elite includes everything in Core, Pro, and Contingency, plus unlimited invoice templates, priority support and a dedicated manager, custom reporting, and compensation tracking, which is why it’s quoted rather than listed at a flat rate.