The Access Legal alternative worth a look is one that tells you the price before you talk to anybody, and includes the AI in it. Writford publishes every figure on a page you can read right now, and puts matters, time, billing, the client account and the AI on the same record.
Access Legal is a serious product from a large group, and firms run happily on it. This page is for the firm at the point of comparing, and it is written to answer the questions that comparison actually turns on.
How quickly can you get to a number
Writford publishes everything. Standard is £828 per seat per year. Every plan includes the full AI, credits and storage are pooled across the firm rather than rationed per seat, and there is a 14-day free trial that needs no card. The pricing page carries the current figures, including the one, three and five year terms.
Access Legal, like most enterprise legal suites, quotes per firm after a conversation. That is a well-established model, and for a larger practice buying implementation, training and migration alongside the licences it often produces a better-fitting number than a public price list would.
So the difference here is not better or worse, it is how fast you can answer your own question. If you want to know the cost today and see the software with your own matters in it this afternoon, you can do that here without booking anything first.
What "included" means, and why it is the question
Large legal suites are usually sold as modules. Case management, then accounts, then compliance, then the portal, then the AI, each one a line on the quote and often a separate implementation.
The number that matters is not the headline seat price, it is the price of the shape your firm actually needs. A quote that starts low and arrives at the same place after four modules is a different proposition from one that starts where it finishes.
On Writford the AI is on every plan for every member: research cited from live UK sources, drafting, and document analysis, on the same matter file as the ledger. It is not a higher tier and it is not an add-on. See all features.
The client account is not a bolt-on
This is where a lot of comparisons are actually decided, because a firm that holds client money cannot treat the accounts as an afterthought.
A client ledger cannot go overdrawn. The balance decrement is atomic and refuses unless the matter already holds the money, so the overdraw is prevented at the moment of posting rather than found on a report afterwards.
The reconciliation is three-way. Bank statement, cash book and the total of the individual client ledgers all have to agree. Two out of three is exactly how a shortfall hides. Month-end will not complete while either variance is anything but zero, and a signed period locks, with a written reason required to reopen it.
Client money cannot be quietly abandoned. A matter still holding client money will not go in the bin, and the refusal names the two proper choices: return it, or move it to the matter that now has a reason to hold it.
The cashier sees everything and changes nothing. Read access and write access are two separate permissions rather than one combined firm-access switch, which is the only way that role works honestly. The client account guide and the three-way reconciliation guide go through both properly.
Built for one jurisdiction on purpose
Access Group software runs across many sectors and many countries. Breadth like that is a genuine strength for a group, and it is a different design goal from ours.
Writford is built for the law of England and Wales and nothing else. The research retrieves from UK sources. The accounts are built around the rules an English or Welsh firm is actually inspected against. The compliance screens ask the questions those rules ask. Nothing has been generalised to also suit somewhere else.
That is a trade and it is worth stating plainly: a firm needing Scotland, Northern Ireland or another jurisdiction is better served elsewhere. A firm entirely in England and Wales gets a product with no compromises made on its behalf.
Can you actually move the data
Yes, and the method matters more than the promise. A recent migration carried 134 matters, 7,711 time entries, 155 invoices and 34,604 files, with the firm still working in its old system while it ran.
The export file is treated as the source of truth rather than the old system's screen, because the old system keeps moving after the export is taken. Both sides are compared on the same tax basis, since a money report that defaults to tax included will manufacture a twenty percent hole against a net figure that is perfectly correct. Balances are reconciled in aged buckets rather than as one total, because the bucket names the cause. Anything the import cannot resolve is reported by name rather than skipped in silence.
How to compare them properly
Three questions settle most of these decisions, and none of them is about feature lists.
What is the real annual figure for our shape of firm, with everything we need switched on? Get it in writing from both, for the same number of seats and the same modules.
Who owns the client account risk? Ask each supplier what happens when somebody tries to post a payment a matter cannot fund. "It appears on an exception report" and "it is refused" are very different answers.
How long until we are running? Ask what the migration includes, what it costs, and what happens to the balances that do not tie out.
You can start Writford today and answer the first one yourself: a 14-day free trial, no card, or read the practice management guide first if you want the full picture of what replaces what.