What a legaltech platform costs for a law firm

In short. An MVP of a legaltech platform with one role and a basic process takes 8–12 weeks. A full B2B2C platform with a partner portal, payments and integrations with government services takes 4–5 months and costs several times more. The largest line in the budget is an unusual one: the expensive part is not generating documents, it is describing the procedure precisely.

We quote in roubles, so the figures below are given as proportions and timelines rather than converted amounts — convert at the rate of the day if you need an absolute number, or ask us for a quote.

Why a CRM does not fit a law firm

A law firm has no sales funnel in the usual sense. It has a procedure: a case moves through stages in a fixed order, and every stage has its own deadlines, its own documents and its own grounds for moving on. Bankruptcy, debt recovery, deal support — these are state machines with rules, not deals sitting in a status.

A CRM can drag a card between stages, but it cannot say that a stage may not be closed until a document has been uploaded, that a deadline counts from the date of publication rather than from the date the task was created, and that missing a deadline sends the procedure back to the previous stage. That is why automating legal work is almost always custom. What is worth automating and what is not is covered separately in legaltech platform: what to automate.

What the budget is made of

Line	Share of budget	What is inside
Describing and implementing the procedure	30–40%	Stages, transitions, deadlines, grounds, reversals
Document generation	15–20%	Templates, data substitution, versions, print forms
Roles and access	10–15%	Lawyer, client, partner, manager, per-case separation
Integrations	15–20%	Payments, government services, mail, electronic signature
Case finances	10–15%	Payments, instalments, expenses, partner settlements

The first line surprises clients most often. The procedure feels known and already written down in an internal regulation. In practice the regulation describes the ideal course of a case, while the system has to know every exception the lawyers keep in their heads.

Two scenarios

MVP with one role, 8–12 weeks. One type of procedure, one role (usually the lawyer), case progression through stages, generation of the main documents, file storage. That is enough to stop running cases in spreadsheets and to see where the procedure stalls.

Platform with a client and a partner, 4–5 months. This adds a client portal showing the stage of their case and the documents uploaded, a partner portal with settlements, payments and instalments, and integrations with government services. At that point it is no longer an internal system but a product used from outside.

What moves the estimate most

The number of procedures. One procedure with ten stages is noticeably cheaper than three procedures with five stages each: every one has its own documents, deadlines and exceptions. Extending to a second procedure is cheaper than the first, but it is work, not configuration.

Branching transitions. A linear procedure is cheap. A procedure where a case goes back to a previous stage, gets suspended, splits, or merges with another case needs to be designed separately.

Integrations with government services. They are unstable, their formats change, and they have to be budgeted with room for retries and manual handling. A project that counted one of these as an ordinary API will almost certainly overrun.

Electronic signature and personal data. The requirements for storage and access are stricter here than in ordinary B2B, and they affect both the architecture and the infrastructure.

What inflates a project quietly

A procedure only one person knows. If a single lawyer knows all the exceptions and also runs the cases, their time becomes the bottleneck of the project. Budget for 20–30% of that person’s time and agree it before the start.

Document templates in a non-editable form. If the templates exist as scans or as files formatted by hand, converting them into something you can substitute data into is separate work that is easy to miss in an estimate.

Historical cases. Migrating past cases into the system almost always costs more than expected, because the old cases were run under different rules. It is often wiser to start with new cases and leave the old ones in an archive.

What brings the cost down

One procedure and one role at the start. A working system in 8–12 weeks produces real feedback, and everything after that is designed from facts.

Not automating what happens once a year. Rare exceptions are cheaper to handle by hand and record the result of than to program.

Ready services for signature, payments and storage. Custom development is justified in the procedure, not in the infrastructure.

Cost of ownership

The benchmark is 15–20% of the development cost per year. The industry has a particular feature: procedures change when legislation changes, and that is not a rare event. Supporting a legaltech platform means not only fixes but regular edits to deadlines, forms and grounds. A system where such changes cannot be made without a rewrite cannot be called a good one, however well it worked on day one.

Common questions

Can we get by with a CRM and some customisation? If the work fits a linear funnel and there are few documents, yes. As soon as there are deadlines with grounds and reversals to a previous stage, CRM customisation becomes more expensive than a custom system and breaks on upgrades.

How soon is the first result? 8–12 weeks to a working MVP covering one procedure. Success is measured by whether the lawyers stopped keeping a parallel spreadsheet.

Do we need the client portal straight away? Usually not. It adds a lot of value, but it is easier to design once the internal part works and it is clear what the client should actually see.

Why is the range so wide? Because “legaltech platform” describes both a case management system for one team and a product with a partner network. Before the procedure has been described, a single number would be a fabrication.

The first step

Inside the range, the price is set by the number of procedures, how much the transitions branch, and the integrations with government services.

The first step is not choosing a vendor. It is describing one procedure end to end, exceptions included. That is the most expensive part of the project, and it cannot be done faster than it is done.

How we do it: legaltech platform development.