Align Launches Align Research (August 3): $100 Fixed Cost Per Research Job, No Hallucinations, No Subscription — Case Retrieval Not Generation

Align, a litigation technology company founded by a trial lawyer, launched Align Research into general availability on August 3. The product's design principle is a direct engineering response to the hallucination problem: it retrieves existing court opinions rather than generating answers. Lawyers submit research questions in plain language; Align Research runs the job over a few hours; results are delivered by email as a curated set of real case opinions with relevant passages marked and citations available for independent verification. Because the tool retrieves rather than generates, the company's claim that it cannot hallucinate is architecturally valid — it is not producing legal analysis or original text; it is locating and surfacing opinions that exist. Pricing is explicitly productised: $100 per research job, billed directly back to the matter as a line item; three jobs per month free and permanent; no subscription, no seat minimum, no database contract, no enterprise contract. The tool is SOC 2 Type II certified and is described as trusted by Am Law 100 firms. For legal engineers building productised legal research tools: Align Research's pricing architecture is the most important feature. The fixed $100 per-task cost — designed to be billed directly to a matter — converts a historically unbillable or disputed time entry (junior associate research hours, which clients increasingly refuse to pay) into a productised, transparent, client-defensible cost. The model is precisely the productised service design that the New Legal Frontier audience has been theorising for years; Align has simply shipped it.