How the Four-Month Membership Works: Instruments, Cycles and Carryover

The membership on Legalise is a single paid offer: a four-month term for Rs. 3250. What is less obvious from the price alone is how the term actually spends, because it is not a flat monthly subscription with a clock that resets on the same date every time. It is a fixed 120-day contract built out of four shorter cycles, and the difference matters once you are near the end of one.

What an instrument is

Every generated document, every compiled briefing and every Matter Reviewer run costs one instrument, regardless of what happens internally to produce it. A retry on the platform's own side, a document that needed a second pass to fix an empty section, a review that ran its full internal process twice: none of that is charged twice. You are billed once for the thing you asked for, whether it took the engine one attempt or two to deliver it properly.

Four cycles, not one long allowance

The 120-day term is divided into four instrument cycles of 30 days each. Each cycle carries its own allowance of 120 instruments. This is why the fee structure is described in terms of an "instrument cycle" rather than a "billing cycle" or a "month": nothing is charged again at the 30-day mark, and the reset does not track calendar months, so a cycle that starts mid-June ends in mid-July rather than at the end of June.

What happens to what you do not use

Within an active term, unused instruments are not simply lost at the end of a cycle. Half of what remains carries forward into the next cycle, with no cap on how much can carry over that way, so a quiet month does not erase a busy one that follows it.

When the term itself ends and you renew into a fresh one, the carryover rule changes: up to 100 unused instruments are preserved into the new term. This is deliberately a smaller number than the uncapped mid-term carryover, because a renewal is a new contract rather than a continuation of the old allowance.

Renewing on time

The renewal window opens seven days before the term's expiry date and stays open for seven days after it. Renewing inside that window is treated as a continuation: your cycle state and carryover follow the rules above. If the term lapses past that window without renewal, the account does not stop working. It falls back to the Complimentary tier, covered in The Complimentary Account: What Ten Instruments Actually Gets You, and a fresh paid term afterward starts clean rather than carrying anything forward.

Credits are a separate pool

Separately from the regular allowance, an account can hold compensation credits. These are granted directly, typically to make up for a service issue, and they behave differently from the ordinary cycle allowance in three ways: they never expire, they are spent only after the regular allowance is exhausted, and they can be used by an account in any state, including one that has fallen back to the Complimentary tier. A credit still buys the same quality of drafting as a paid instrument, whatever tier is currently holding it.

Why this is worth understanding before you need it

None of this matters until the week you are drafting more than usual, or the week your renewal date quietly passes while you are in the middle of a matter. Knowing that half of what you do not use follows you into the next cycle, and that a missed renewal is a soft fallback rather than a hard stop, is the difference between planning around the membership and being surprised by it.