Some legal tech providers are releasing free products as they look for ways to remain relevant in the eyes of clients grappling COVID-19 disruption and a volatile economy. But as other legal tech companies undertake lay-offs or furloughs in order to stay afloat, can legal tech afford to keep the free offerings flowing?

The truth is it may depend on both the company and the industry niche it occupies. For example, signature and closing management tool provider SimplyAgree announced in March that its platform would be available free of charge through the end of June to assist law firms making the transition to remote working environments. Three months free is a long time, but the company has a certain degree of delayed gratification regularly built into its sales projections.

SimplyAgree CEO Will Norton said it's not unusual for attorneys to request a free trial period even after seeing a demo of a product. Even law firms that are interested in adopting the platform often have to postpone taking formal action until the next budgeting cycle.

"This is maybe just a little bit more of an extended period, where we know that we might not have any new sales coming in but we have a large customer base already that are happy with our tool and are continuing to pay us for our tool," Norton said.

In some ways, SimplyAgree is making a sort of educated gamble. By granting prospective customers access to their platform for free, the company is banking on the hope that those same folks will stick around after the COVID-19 pandemic has ended and regular rates once more apply.

Norton is confident that lawyers who adopted electronic signature tech to support clients working remotely won't revert to pen and paper now that they've become accustomed to the process. "One thing I don't expect to go back to the way it was before COVID is the adoption of electronic signatures. We saw that was really the main reason that firms took us up on the offer initially," Norton said.

Enterprise application software provider Onit may have even less to lose. The company is offering a variety of free business continuity apps geared towards helping users manage issues such as COVID-19 exposure reporting and financial impact tracking.

Eric Elfman, co-founder and CEO of Onit, said that the apps were originally built for internal use to help the company address some of its own pandemic-related needs. The apps cost nothing to release commercially and therefore making them available to the public free of charge seemed like a no-lose proposition that could ultimately help boost the Onit's exposure inside the legal industry.

"I want our customers to think that we're leaning into this current situation and thinking about their needs too and not thinking solely about the dollar," Elfman said.

But not every legal tech company's business model blends seamlessly with the offering of free goods or services. Elfman believes that there's a relatively small slice of the legal tech market that can make those types of deals available.

"It would cost a lot of money for most e-discovery providers to offer something for free, because they are not a workflow app. They are a solution for a very specific problem," he said.

Also, just because a company drops a product onto the market for free doesn't mean that it will grab the public's attention. Gretchen Bakhshai, senior vice president of sales at contract intelligence and analysis platform Knowable, pointed to the glut of COVID-19 related materials occupying people's inboxes, which may require legal tech providers to think long and hard about the problems their clients are currently attempting to solve.

For instance, Knowable's Portfolio Visibility interface—which is available free through the end of 2020—allows users to search across their entire contract portfolio to find specific provisions or map customer and supplier relationships. The thinking was to provide the first step for users struggling to organize or peruse their contracts for clauses like force majeure in the wake of COVID-19.

At the very least, it could help Knowable maintain its connection to customers as the economy continues to move at a slower clip. "I think for us it's such a natural, easy thing. Relationships are important," Bakhshai said.