Legal Tech Predictions for 2026
We asked attorneys, entrepreneurs, innovators, and partners for their predictions about where legal technology is heading in 2026.
The responses touch upon many aspects of employing artificial intelligence in the practice of law, including: legal tech adoption, accuracy and trust, large language models vs. small language models, improving operations, media verification, and workflows, and the use of customized solutions.
Artificial intelligence is here to stay: the question for legal professionals is how to navigate it properly and professionally.
AI tools help humans be more efficient, but that “e-word” doesn’t appeal to lawyers striving to hit a billing quota. Clients know these tools can cut down on wasted time and they'll insist their legal counsel take advantage of them.
That will compel some lawyers to be creative in still delivering high-quality representation while ethically engaging AI assistants and tools. This is where the “hype” will be focused in 2026.
A more specific question that AI use brings up in the litigation / e-discovery realm is: How are clients using AI tools and will their prompts and interactions be discoverable? This will be a big question in 2026 especially in light of the In re OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation where the New York Times is requesting OpenAI to produce interactions with ChatGPT.
If you’re a litigator, be aware that you may need to start instructing your clients that their internal AI prompts and interactions may be subject to a legal hold in the event they are potentially relevant to a litigation matter.
AI will continue to be the biggest news in 2026. but keep a steady head in all the craziness and focus on small, but effective, implementations of AI that you can make in your everyday practice.
—Brett Burney, eLaw Evangelist at Nextpoint
Beyond the large language model (LLM) paradigm: The LLM monoculture will fracture in 2026. Legal AI will diversify beyond text generation into genuinely emergent architectures. Reinforcement learning systems will master procedural strategy through iterative optimization.
Text-diffusion models will synthesize novel arguments from latent semantic space, and multi-modal transformers will integrate case law with deposition video and courtroom acoustics. This isn't incremental improvement—it's architectural evolution.
The legal problems we couldn't solve with probabilistic text prediction will become tractable. We'll see intelligence becoming plural, specialized, and considerably more useful.
—Dr. Cain Elliot, Chief Legal Futurist of Filevine
Overcoming hesitation: In 2025, AI companies made enormous progress in extracting structured information from medical records. For the first time, systems could reliably turn thousands of messy PDF pages into clean, organized data—diagnoses, procedures, medications, timelines, provider lists, and more. But despite this technical leap, adoption lagged. Legal teams hesitated to rely on AI without the right guardrails, transparency, or workflow fit.
Closing the adoption gap: In 2026, that gap between technical capability and real-world usage starts to close. This will be the year law firms, IME vendors, carriers, and legal-tech developers finally crack the trust problem. We’ll see tools that provide auditable fact-linking back to the source page, role-appropriate controls, predictable output formats, and reasoning traces that make AI decisions intelligible.
As trust and workflow integration mature, adoption will accelerate quickly. AI will move from “interesting tool” to expected baseline in medical-legal work.
Shift from extraction to interpretation: AI will begin reasoning about what the data actually means in the context of a case. Systems will identify missing records, conflicting evidence, gaps in care, fraud indicators, and causation inconsistencies. They’ll compare current cases to historical patterns, surface legal and medical inflection points, and highlight the issues that matter most to evaluators and attorneys.
New expectations: By the end of 2026, the legal industry will no longer ask whether AI can extract information from documents. It will expect AI to understand the case, interrogate the evidence, and elevate the practitioner’s judgment.
—Erick Enriquez, CEO and Cofounder of InQuery
Focus on efficiencies: Over the next year, LegalTech will continue reshaping how legal and claims professionals manage daily operations, streamlining workflows, and improving outcomes. Integrated platforms will connect case management, records retrieval, communication, and reporting systems, allowing teams to work more efficiently while reducing manual errors and bottlenecks.
Mobile-enabled access will expand, giving attorneys, adjusters, and support staff the flexibility to review documents, approve tasks, and collaborate in real time from anywhere.
Data-driven insights and business analytics will become more embedded in everyday processes, helping teams identify trends, allocate resources strategically, and monitor performance across portfolios. Automation of routine tasks like document generation, notifications, and workflow triggers will free up time for higher-value work, improving both productivity and client satisfaction.
Security and compliance will remain central, with encrypted communication, role-based permissions, and built-in audit logs ensuring defensible records and regulatory adherence. Recruiting and onboarding processes may also benefit from LegalTech tools, making it easier to track workflows, assign responsibilities, and bring new team members up to speed efficiently.
Smarter, not just faster: Legal tech will help offices operate smarter, not just faster, delivering better results by combining streamlined operations, real-time visibility, and actionable insights. Teams that adopt these tools thoughtfully will be able to focus on strategy, collaboration, and outcomes that truly matter.
—Bridgette Ferraro, CEO of iCopy Legal
Data and Information Governance Are Your Best Defense—and Offense—in the 2026 AI Regulatory Environment
In 2026, data and information governance will become essential tools for supporting AI governance, especially as regulatory uncertainty continues. The recent December 11 Executive Order, “Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence,” signals the federal government's intent to challenge state laws that require AI models to change “truthful outputs” or “compel developers to disclose information in ways that may violate constitutional rights.”
This focus on “truthful outputs” ties into the administration’s broader shift on eliminating DEI-related policies. But it also prompts a critical question that organizations have been struggling with: How can companies ensure their data is reliable and their AI outputs are correct?
The best defense in this AI regulatory environment is for organizations to establish or strengthen data and information governance programs to reinforce their AI policies. Effective governance delivers three main benefits: it boosts confidence in data inputs through integrity and authenticity, enforces retention policies to keep current and accurate data, and provides documented processes that serve as a shield and sword (the offense!), explaining and justifying the truth and accuracy of AI outputs.
Bar associations are a valuable resource to provide guidelines, template policies, and updates on regulatory and statutory changes, helping legal teams advising organizations to stay informed and compliant in an ever-evolving legal landscape.
As the regulatory landscape evolves, robust data and information governance will be both a defensive and proactive strategy, ensuring organizations can navigate compliance requirements and demonstrate the validity of their AI-driven decisions.
—Taa Grays, President-Elect, New York State Bar Association
AI changes litigation and dispute resolution more than anything in modern—and perhaps human— history given its nearly unlimited analytical capabilities. Even with the complexities of modern litigation and hundreds of thousands of documents, skilled use of AI can analyze all of it to make finding the truth or at least narrowing the points of factual dispute a very routine endeavor.
The optimist in me says that 2026 will bring more efficiency, fairness, and accountability to litigation, both insiders and outsiders - thru responsible use of AI. The realist in me states "nothing will change in 2026.
—Chris Hanson, Attorney & Founder of Truth Over Chaos
AI will raise the bar for proof—in both directions: Legal tech just had a $4.3 billion year. The pitch is always some version of "AI makes lawyers faster." And it does. But here's what most predictions miss: AI is also making the world around lawyers messier—and making courts less trusting of what ends up in front of them.
Sora can generate photorealistic video. Google's tools can fabricate documents that look legitimate. The same technology that helps a paralegal summarize depositions in minutes makes it trivial for someone to fake a photo from their couch. Legal has always been slow to adopt technology—but the world around it isn't waiting.
And it's not just bad actors. Even purpose-built legal AI tools hallucinate somewhere in the 5–10% range. You used to trust that a lawyer citing a case had actually read it. Now judges have to wonder if the citation is real. We've already seen attorneys sanctioned for submitting briefs with fabricated case law. That's not going away. It's going to get worse before the tooling catches up.
This creates a duality that will define the next few years.
On one side: pressure to get faster. Clients expect quicker turnaround. Firms that automate intake, billing, and back-office work will handle more volume at lower cost. A solo practitioner with the right tech stack might run with the efficiency of a multi-partner firm. The ones still managing cases out of their inbox will lose business to firms that aren't.
On the other side: the bar for proof keeps rising. Service could once be demonstrated with GPS timestamps and photos. That worked—until spoofing apps and AI-generated images made those safeguards easy to beat. But it's not just service of process. Courts are going to look at all digital evidence with more skepticism. Briefs, exhibits, affidavits—the assumption that what's submitted is authentic is eroding.
Lawyers, judges, defendants, plaintiffs—they all want the same thing: confidence that something actually happened. That a document is real. That a citation checks out. As synthetic content floods every channel and AI outputs stay unreliable, that confidence gets harder to come by.
The 2026 prediction: Breakout legal tech companies won't just make workflows faster; they'll solve the verification problem AI is creating—giving firms both the efficiency to compete and the defensibility to hold up when someone challenges the evidence.
The firms that figure out this balance won't just survive; they'll be the ones handling the volume that slower, less trustworthy competitors can't.
—Dima Kovalev, VP of Product at Proof
Employment of AI: Al will be expanded in the larger firms via internal applications. In essence, custom AI will search local servers and not use the Internet as a source of information. Thus, when a query is made, the information retrieved will be more accurate and trustworthy.
There is still a need for human review and checking of the materials. This is completely different from OpenAI, Gemini, or Copilot that create false narratives and fictional case law; lawyers have been fined and sanctioned for using such programs in their motions and briefs.
Operations and efficiencies: There will be advancements in the form cost-cutting attorneys and creating part-time positions for attorneys. Attorneys are now a commodity and many are not earning a livable income.
There will also be mergers and acquisitions of law firms to decrease redundancies which are regularly featured in Law360. Every week, Law360 announces partners are leaving their firms to create new and more efficient practices that allow clients to be serviced more effectively. Some firms have turned to outsourcing, and I believe that trend will continue.
Business analytics: This is going to be huge in 2026. Law firms are going to start moving from the notion that they are just service providers to the fact that they need more productivity at less of a cost basis.
The need for consultants to guide law firms, in terms of business analytics, is also going to become prevalent, as many firms aren't currently tracking all of the KPIs they should be. Board meetings will now be about productivity vs. costs instead of just focusing on client retention and billable hours.
—Yonatan Levoritz, Founder, The Levoritz Law Firm
Risk and liabilities: The AI boom is triggering the fastest data-center buildout in history. We’re pouring concrete and ordering chips before infrastructure, law, and regulations can catch up.
This opens an entire new front of risk relating to the use and deployment of the technology needed to support the AI boom. It’s an easy prediction that technology liabilities will follow.
—Stuart Panensky, Founding Partner, Cyber & Privacy Attorney at Pierson Ferdinand
AI adoption: In 2026, the ethical burden will shift from whether attorneys can use AI to whether they can justify not using it when AI tools demonstrably reduce errors and costs for clients. But adoption will hit a wall at depositions, negotiations, and anywhere opposing counsel can exploit the "AI touched this document" argument to create doubt.
Security issues: It won't just be about preventing breaches—it'll be about maintaining attorney-client privilege in an era where every AI query potentially lives on a third-party server. Firms that solve for truly private, on-premise AI solutions will win the clients who can't afford to be anyone's test case.
—Joseph Raetzer, Attorney and Legal Content Reviewer at LawDistrict
Evolution of AI: The legal technology landscape is evolving rapidly. As building new AI tools becomes easier, the focus must shift from assisting lawyers with individual tasks to creating end-to-end solutions that complete entire jobs.
Today’s AI often functions as a copilot, summarizing documents or suggesting research terms. While there are many tools that assist paralegals and lawyers, very few actually complete a task from start to finish.
Tomorrow’s successful legal AI will move toward agentic workflows, orchestrating complex, multi-step processes such as drafting a complaint, e-filing it, saving the conformed filing, or managing the full discovery lifecycle without constant human oversight. This shift is essential for legal teams to optimize workflows and focus on high-value, strategic work.
Customization: Out-of-the-box AI solutions are difficult to scale across diverse law firms, each of which requires specialized knowledge and custom processes. As a result, the future of legal tech will belong to custom Small Language Models (SLMs) embedded within individual firms. This move toward in-house, custom AI will be the key to unlocking true, comprehensive automation in the legal sector.
—Pratik Shah, Co-Founder and CEO / EsquireTek; Associate Director, Litigation / Panish | Shea | Ravipudi LLP
