Fair question
Why not just use LegalZoom or Avvo?
LegalZoom, Avvo, and Rocket Lawyer are real products with real users. They work well for what they were built for. The question is whether they were built for an active criminal case — where what you need is not a document template or a 30-minute phone consultation, but a read of your specific file.
The tables below show what each service covers, what it doesn't, and where the claim comes from. Every verdict links to a primary source. Rows marked "Verification pending" mean the vendor's published terms were unclear; we don't guess.
Category reframe
LegalZoom sells documents. Incorporations, wills, leases. It also sells phone-consultation plans — but those exclude violent felonies by contract.
Avvo sold per-minute attorney access. Avvo Advisor shut down in 2018. What remains is a lawyer directory and a public Q&A forum. Neither is your file.
Rocket Lawyer sells a next-business-day answer to legal questions. That is useful for contracts and landlord disputes. It is not a case-file read.
We sell the four things every defendant needs before their next attorney meeting: what the prosecution's evidence actually shows, what questions to ask, what defenses fit the charge, and what the local judges and prosecutors have done in similar cases. That is not a document. It is organized access to the public record on your case.
What each service covers
LegalZoom
| Dimension | Coverage | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Criminal defense scope LegalZoom's Legal Plan contract states that telephone consultations with the network attorney may not discuss violent felonies, and the plan itself centers on civil matters (estate, business, contracts). For criminal cases that fall outside the consult, members are pointed to a discounted hourly rate with a network attorney. | Does not cover | |
| Pricing transparency LegalZoom's Personal Attorney Plan page publishes a 6-month price of $16.59/mo and a 12-month price of $19.84/mo without requiring signup. INAA matches this transparency standard — every tier and standalone price is visible before the buy button. | Covers this | |
| Refund policy LegalZoom's LZ Guarantee gives 60 days on filed products that haven't been submitted, 7 days after completion on non-filed downloads, and 30 days on subscriptions. The window narrows once the product is delivered — a structure INAA mirrors for case-specific briefs. | Partial | |
| Deliverable shape LegalZoom's Personal Attorney Plan includes 'Unlimited 30-minute attorney consults on new legal matters' plus document templates. The deliverable is a conversation and reusable forms — not a written, case-specific intelligence brief for an active criminal case. | Does not cover |
Avvo
| Dimension | Coverage | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Criminal defense scope Avvo currently operates as a lawyer directory and a free public Q&A forum. Per Avvo's own About page, 97% of US lawyers are rated and 17.7 million legal Q&As are searchable, but the fixed-fee paid service that previously routed criminal questions to specific lawyers (Avvo Advisor) was shut down following state-bar ethics rulings. | Partial | |
| Pricing transparency Avvo's Q&A forum is free to post in and returns answers from real lawyers within hours. There is no paid Avvo product currently priced on the public site — the previous $39 Avvo Advisor consultation was discontinued in 2018. | Covers this | |
| Deliverable shape Avvo's primary defendant-facing deliverable today is a community Q&A — short answers in a public, searchable forum, hours after the question is posted. The format does not include case-specific document review, jurisdiction-specific statute analysis, or anything tied to the defendant's discovery. | Partial |
Rocket Lawyer
| Dimension | Coverage | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing transparency Rocket Lawyer's pricing page lists three tiers: Standard at $12.41/mo (billed annually at $149), Plus at $20.75/mo ($249/year), and Pro at $29.08/mo ($349/year). All three are subscription products with a free 7-day trial. | Covers this | |
| Deliverable shape Rocket Lawyer's standard membership benefit is an asynchronous question-and-answer service: 'Ask questions about a legal situation or document and get an answer within 1 business day.' That is a Q&A turnaround, not a case-specific written brief tied to the defendant's charge sheet, discovery, or jurisdiction. | Does not cover | |
| Refund policy Rocket Lawyer's checkout page advertises a cancel-anytime policy and a 7-day free trial, but we could not retrieve a primary-source page with a structured refund-window definition (60-day, 30-day, etc.) comparable to LegalZoom's published refund matrix. The cancel-anytime language refers to forward subscription cancellation, not retroactive refunds on past charges. | Verification pending |
JustAnswer
| Dimension | Coverage | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Deliverable shape JustAnswer publicly markets a chat-based expert-matching service. As of 2026-05-21, JustAnswer's pricing, terms-of-service, and disclaimer pages all returned HTTP 403 to direct fetch from this environment, so we cannot quote their own description of the deliverable, pricing, or legal-advice disclaimer verbatim. Until verified directly from a JustAnswer-hosted URL, this row stays marked unclear rather than fabricating a claim. | Verification pending |
"Verification pending" means the vendor's published terms did not clearly confirm or deny coverage. We do not extrapolate.
What we actually use
We don't sell access to a proprietary model. We sell organized access to the public record — court opinions, sentencing data, prosecution patterns from filed cases — applied to your charge, your jurisdiction, and your judge.
Every citation in your report comes from public records your attorney can pull. The work we charge for is the reading and the organizing — not access to the data. Your time is your time.
Pricing
We don't hide pricing.
- Case Decoder — $197 — a read of your charges, your jurisdiction, and your next court date, delivered in 48 hours.
- LegalZoom personal plan — $16.59–$19.84/month — unlimited attorney consultations on new matters; violent felonies excluded.
- Rocket Lawyer — $12.41–$29.08/month — next-business-day answers to legal questions.
We are not saying the others are overpriced. We are saying the products are different. Buying the wrong one costs more than the price.
We don't give legal advice, predict outcomes, or replace your attorney. What we don't do
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