Different online legal services excel at different features. Some are ideal for helping manage your business formation, while others can help you obtain the right permits and protect your business in court. We’ve gathered and reviewed six of the best online legal service providers to help you with your small business legal needs.
- Best for Expert Help: LegalZoom
- Most User Friendly: Rocket Lawyer
- Best for Ongoing Legal Support: LegalShield
- Most Comprehensive: ZenBusiness
- Best for Branding: Tailor Brands
- Most Cost Effective: Bizee (Powered by Incfile)
Online Legal Services Pricing Comparison
Online legal services include a wide range of different legal help options and pricing varieties. Below, you’ll learn more about the unique pricing options available. These pricing options do not include the cost of state filing fees for business formation.
| Service | Pricing | Cost Range | Primary Offerings |
|---|---|---|---|
| LegalZoom | One-time payment for business formation | $0 to $349 | Business formation, estate, family, real estate and other business offerings |
| Rocket Lawyer | Monthly payments OR annual payments (yearly payments get major discounts on other services) | $19.99 per month (billed annually) or $39.99 monthly | Business documentation, signing support, legal advice |
| ZenBusiness | One-time payment for business formation services with optional packages | $0 to $349 as an annual payment | Business formation and support; support includes optional features like business website support, EIN registration and registered agent services |
| LegalShield | A combination of monthly cost (for personal users) to one-time payments (to start a business) | $24.95 per month for personal users to $169 for business users | Family law, personal needs, estates and wills, real estate, business formation and more |
| Tailor Brands | One-time payments for business formation that you can spread to monthly payments | $0 to $249 for annual cost of business formation. | LLC formation, branding support, business banking, documentation creation |
| Bizee | One-time payments for LLC formation | $0 to $349 as a one-time payment for business formation services | Business formation, non-profit formation |
Business formation services vary heavily when you consider pricing, starting from $0 for standard formations and going up to $350. These higher-cost services often include further support, such as business documentation reviews, registered agent services and extra customer support.
Companies that offer monthly services focus more on continuous support. This can include personal legal advice, which you can find with Rocket Lawyer or LegalShield. These services offer cost-effective services to people who could not afford a law firm normally.
Optional services, such as trademark search, filing of annual reports and business website creation, can add to these annual fees. More complex services, such as registering a trademark, will cost hundreds, while simpler services can add less than $100 to your annual costs.
What Do Online Legal Services Offer?
When hiring an online legal services company, it helps to know what it offers. Below, you’ll see where each provider focuses and the services behind them.
Business Formation
Recommended companies:
- LegalZoom: Provides business creation packages that include operating agreements, articles of formation and hands-on guidance through formation
- ZenBusiness: Packages include getting an EIN, creating an operating agreement and other business documents that could be cheaper than LegalZoom’s services
- Bizee: Includes free registered agent services for a year, help with IRS forms and name-searching services across multiple package
All the providers on our review list offer services to help you form a business entity. Starting a business includes everything from a sole proprietorship to an S Corporation. For more information on the most popular type of formation, check out this article on the different types of LLCs.
Contract Creation and Review
Recommended companies:
- Rocket Lawyer: Provides a platform to review documents and have stakeholders sign these contracts
- LegalZoom: Premium package includes continuous, ongoing business advice and the ability to create documents from a wide range of templates
- LegalShield: Offers between 10 to 50 document reviews to provide you with advice on potential changes
Contract creation is a vital part of your business, and legal document reviews make sure those contracts are enforceable. You’ll thank yourself for these documents when you have a runaway client, which may happen to any small business.
Estate Planning
Recommended companies:
- LegalZoom: Offers a complete estate plan bundle that includes managing living wills, power of attorneys and your last will and testament
- Rocket Lawyer: Provides a range of easy estate planning documents to fill out, requiring you to answer simple questions
- LegalShield: Provides consultation services and helps in writing a last will and testament, living will, establishing a trust and power of attorney documents
Planning your estate can include creating a living trust, last will and testament and power of attorney. Having these managed ahead of time can give you peace.
Trademark and Copyright Filings
Recommended companies:
- LegalZoom: Provides premium trademark registration services alongside attorney guidance, a trademark search and the ability to transfer this service to another trademark if the first doesn’t work. Copyright filings are also available.
- Tailor Brands: Provides a simple, hands-off trademark registration process for businesses based in the U.S.
- Bizee: An inexpensive trademark registration alternative that includes a search system
Copyright is ideal if you want to protect a creative work (art, films and written work) while trademarking is better if you want to protect a business name, slogan or logo. Both systems are necessary for different businesses, but LegalZoom is one of the few major providers of copyright registration.
Real Estate Documents
Recommended companies:
- Rocket Lawyer: Provides a range of real estate documents that include helpful options for landlords, homeowners and rental tenants
- LegalShield: Provides a wide range of legal documents and advice on an inexpensive personal plan
- LegalZoom: Offers a more limited range of documents that include residential lease agreements and property deeds.
Regarding the dynamics of property laws, Rocket Lawyer and LegalShield offer a comprehensive list of legal documents alongside professional advice from experienced lawyers. LegalZoom only provides two services, which include an attorney consultation.
Family Law Documents
Recommended companies:
- LegalShield: Provides documents related to divorce, name changes, prenuptial agreements and child custody alongside legal advice
- Rocket Lawyer: Provides legal advice alongside divorce settlement agreements, parenting plans, child care authorization forms and prenuptial agreements
LegalShield provides a more comprehensive list of documents, with Rocket Lawyer including some unique documents. Both companies are ideal for curbing some of the high costs of hiring divorce lawyers. LegalZoom plans on releasing an alternative to both services eventually.
Tax Filings and Audits
Recommended companies:
- LegalZoom: LZ Tax is LegalZoom’s tax service, offering advisory services and services for filing tax returns on your behalf
- Rocket Lawyer: RocketTax matches you with one of its pros to provide services geared towards individuals, couples, self-employed individuals and business owners
- ZenBusiness: Provides optional, cloud-based accounting and invoicing services that iterate with payment processors like Stripe
Rocket Lawyer is the only service that offers tax filing services, with other businesses offering more limited tax advice. LegalZoom differs because it focuses on high-ticket businesses, while ZenBusiness has a different approach, creating its own invoicing and accounting system.
Ease of Use
When considering how easy an online legal service is to use, it comes down to the simplicity of the website, the availability of advice and how simple it is to fill in templates. Below, you’ll learn more about where each service excels.
Website Navigation and Search
Tailor Brands has the easiest website to navigate out of the providers on this list. With fewer offered services, the website has less information to convey. However, the website is also organized intuitively with helpful tabs, such as “Set up,” “Manage” and “Grow.”
The remaining providers on this list offer more services, so their websites can be overwhelming with the sheer amount of text they have. LegalZoom’s website is organized well, but the remaining websites require a bit of investigation to find exactly what you need.
Interactive Questionnaires vs. Fillable Templates
Rocket Lawyer offers the best of both worlds in fillable templates and questionnaires. This is mainly because the “make a document” section is readily available.
LegalZoom, Tailor Brands, ZenBusiness and Bizee offer simple processes to create your own legal documents. LegalShield focuses more on providing personal legal advice.
Online Account Dashboard
The best account dashboard is generally LegalZoom, which guides you through a simple, step-by-step process. However, if you want invoicing services, ZenBusiness offers the best alternative.
Two services, Bizee and Tailor Brands, also provide solid dashboards. Tracking the results of LLC formations and registering business domains are simple between the two brands.
The weaker dashboards are available from LegalShield and Rocket Lawyer. This is mostly because their dashboard comprises a list of services and legal documents you’ve requested.
Tech Tools
ZenBusiness offers the best tech tools, especially if you have a limited budget. These tools include a generator for slogans and names, calculators for loans and break-even points and an invoice generator and QR code creator. You can also use its accounting system, invoicing software and business banking services if you pay.
You might think Tailor Brands offers the best toolset if you need creative services. It integrates with business card platforms, website experts, a business mailbox and a logo builder. Like ZenBusiness, Tailor Brands also integrates with business banking services.
LegalZoom offers many services but has limited tools.
These major platforms (minus Bizee) also provide some form of mobile app. The logo maker from Tailor Brands is its app. LegalShield and Rocket Lawyer offer the most useful apps, offering you access to templates and advice on your mobile device.
Education Resources
The best and most accessible educational resources are available through Bizee. You can get advice directly from the resources section of the home page. Best of all, it’s free.
You can get a lawyers help from Rocket Lawyer and LegalShield for more guided resources. But, like LegalZoom and Tailor Brands, alternative resources are limited to the blog, requiring you to know what to search for to find information.
ZenBusiness offers a solid resource for beginners through ZenBusiness Academy. But you’ll run out of these resources quickly, making them less useful.
Document Quality
All the online legal services we review offer some form of document creation. However, only some of them offer document review services.
LegalZoom is the most useful for document creation if you don’t mind giving up customization. It offers over 150 attorney-drafted documents for free. This includes bills of sale or agency agreements, but this doesn’t come with any obvious document review (but you could pay for a consultation).
The widest range of attorney review options comes from LegalShield, which offers up to 40 reviews per year (up to 25 pages for each document). You must pay for the small business services to get these reviews. You can get reviews for outside documents or from templates on the website.
Other websites, like LegalZoom, Bizee, Tailor Brands and ZenBusiness will create the documents for you. This is the case when going through a business formation, where you fill out a questionnaire to keep things simple. These documents are not customizable.
Rocket Lawyer also offers a similar range of templates you can use, but to get the full document customization and review, you’ll need to pay for a year of services upfront.
Customer Service
Regarding customer service, ZenBusiness is the best provider on average, with a 4.7 out of 5 on Trustpilot. This is tied with Bizee and close to all the remaining services, minus LegalZoom. At 3.2 out of 5, LegalZoom receives more critical reviews. ZenBusiness, LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer are all BBB accredited with an A plus rating. Whereas, Bizee and Tailor Brands are not BBB accredited. Much of the satisfaction comes from these companies offering 60-day money-back guarantees, with Tailor Brands offering a respectable 30 days.
All the companies on this list offer phone, email and chat support. So, if you have a customer service issue, it’s easy to resolve. It wouldn’t be much of a “best of” list otherwise.
But if you are looking for the best legal advisory services, that depends on what you need. Only Tailor Brands and LegalShield offer more general legal advice. Meanwhile, depending on the package you pay for, you could get help with business legal matters, with premium plans offering more hands-on guidance.
The Bottom Line
These online legal services provide an excellent array of services for businesses, personal matters, families and those seeking general legal advice. Whether you’re starting a new business or seeking legal consultations for personal use, you’ll find something for you on our list above.
Based on pricing, LegalShield offers the most comprehensive choice. Small business owners and people with limited budgets will find the costs very reasonable. But if you’re looking for business formation services, you must look elsewhere.
LegalZoom offers the widest range of services for business owners. But ZenBusiness, Tailor Brands and Bizee also offer an impressive range of services for those starting their own business. If your goal is to get legal documentation, seek Rocket Lawyer.
But despite the impressive array of services these companies offer, they are not intended to replace situations that need more technical help. For complex legal situations, consult a lawyer.
Frequently Asked Questions
Legal forms from online legal services are typically created by lawyers in various fields, making them pretty legit. To confirm the legitimacy of these documents, you might consider consulting legal advice. Many of the websites featured in this article offer legal consultation and document review services.
No. LegalZoom and LegalShield are two different services. LegalShield specializes in legal consultation services for personal and legal matters. On the other hand, LegalZoom is geared more toward new business owners.
Rocket Lawyer is better if you want a service that produces legal documents. LegalShield is better for those seeking more general legal advice. While the two offer very similar services, they excel in different areas.
Yes. Rocket Lawyer is a legitimate business offering legal advice, document templates and tax support services. It’s also one of the few legal services that offers a free trial. So if you want to determine its legitimacy for yourself, you can create a quick legal document and test it out.
In most cases, you can trust online legal services. All the services reviewed on this page are established and trusted. For other online services, be sure to check out a company’s public reputation on the Better Business Bureau and Trustpilot.
You should subscribe to an online legal company for long-term legal services. Subscription-based services on this list are LegalShield and Rocket Lawyer, offering legal advice and template access over long-term periods. If you need help with business formation, those are typically offered as a one-time payment.
To set up an LLC, you need to pay your state’s filing fees and fill out Articles of Organization. The Articles of Organization is a legal document containing details on the business structure, name, members and purpose. You can usually get these documents on your local Secretary of State website.
While attorney services can be helpful, you do not need to hire a lawyer to register an LLC. An LLC requires a registered agent, which can be you in most states. Legal services can double-check your paperwork to ensure it meets your state’s requirements. Online legal services can be an inexpensive alternative to hiring an attorney.
Methodology: How We Rated the Best Online Legal Services
To provide consumers with objective and accurate information, our credentialed legal experts created a comprehensive rating system for Limited Liability Company (LLC) services. We researched five online LLC, registered agent and trademark registration services, including ZenBusiness, LegalZoom, Swyft Filings, Northwest Registered Agent and Bizee (formerly Incfile).
We conducted a survey in 2024 of 200 professionals who were currently using LLC services or had used LLC services within the past year. We analyzed the results of this survey to determine the following rating criteria:
- Features (20%)
- Value for Money (25%)
- Customer Service (20%)
- Usability (25%)
- Reputation and Credibility (10%)
Visit the full LLC methodology page for more details on our rating system.
If you have feedback or questions about this article, please email the MarketWatch Guides team at editors@marketwatchguides.
