Top Predictions and Trends for Legal Tech in 2026

The legal industry has undergone monumental changes in the past few years, with the introduction of generative AI marking a genuinely new era for the profession. The rapid adoption of this and other powerful technologies has swiftly moved the conversation from cautious consideration to strategic implementation.

Innovation will continue to unfold at a fast pace as these technologies find their footing and mature within the legal space. The groundwork has been laid for a future where legal professionals are positioned as drivers of change, and legal teams are aligning technology with broader business objectives. The industry is now positioned not just to adapt, but to redefine legal workflows and unlock unprecedented opportunities for innovation and efficiency.

Everlaw gathered the thoughts and opinions of leading voices in the law, including Everlaw employees and customers, to explore their outlook on where this momentum will take the legal industry in 2026.

Julie Brown: 2026 will be a breakthrough year for legal technology

The most significant trend to watch in 2026 is the rapid development of generative AI tools, which are set to transform legal work in ways we are only beginning to imagine. By this time next year, attorneys will be leveraging AI to perform tasks that today seem out of reach, leading to higher-quality work, substantial time savings, and more opportunities for lawyers to focus on strategy and client relationships.

As AI takes over much of the traditional manual work, law firms will need to rethink how they train and develop new attorneys. Innovative solutions—such as AI-powered mentorship and simulated case exercises—will help junior lawyers gain valuable experience without relying on repetitive, tedious tasks. This shift will make the roles of young attorneys more rewarding, allowing them to concentrate on higher-value work and increasing their job satisfaction.

The impact of AI will be felt across all practice areas. Firms that embrace these new tools will gain a clear competitive edge, while those who resist risk falling behind. Perhaps most exciting is the potential to improve how litigation is practiced in the United States. AI will streamline discovery processes, reduce costs for clients, and lead to fairer, faster resolutions.  

Julie Brown, Director of Practice Technology, Vorys

Gloria Lee: Corporate legal teams will establish concrete expectations for how firms use AI

In-house legal departments spent the last two years figuring out their own generative AI policies. That window will close in 2026, and corporate legal teams will establish concrete expectations for how firms use AI and report on its impact.

This shift matters because 60% of in-house teams currently don’t know if their firms are using generative AI on their matters. Transparency, then, becomes a requirement, not a courtesy; law firms that share how they use AI to drive efficiency will deepen client relationships, while those who don’t will face increasing pressure.

Gloria Lee, Chief Legal Officer, Everlaw

Mark Abramowitz: 2026 will be the year AI discovery truly evolves on both sides of the “V”

We will start seeing parties move beyond pilot projects into full-fledged AI-augmented discovery strategies. As data volumes continue to surge—driven by an explosion of data-collecting devices and increasingly complex enterprise systems—litigants will be forced to rethink what “reasonable” preservation, collection, review, and production will look like in this new era. I expect to see new case law that will explore the contours of proportionality, defensibility, and transparency, with judges and litigants alike asking harder questions about training data, validation, and bias.

The net effect won’t just be faster document review; it will be a re-architecture of discovery itself to cope with an explosion of collected—and ultimately produced—data, turning AI from a cost-containment tool into a core litigation competency.

Mark Abramowitz, Partner and Chair of Ediscovery/ESI Practice Group, DiCello Levitt LLP

Chuck Kellner: AI’s potential for dispute resolution will grow

More corporations will experiment with AI for resolving their disputes in 2026. Solutions will range from the American Arbitration Association's AI Arbitrator, to true case assessment using generative AI in ediscovery tools, to leveraging AI for assistance with production reviews and analysis of testimony.

We will reach a tipping point by late 2026 in which AI for use in dispute resolution is normal. Lawyers and courts will accommodate with appropriate language for quality and completeness in ESI protocols and discovery orders.

Chuck Kellner, Senior Strategic Discovery Advisor, Everlaw

Joanne Sprague: AI experiments in the access to justice space will start to pay off

2026 will be the year that AI innovation by the underdogs really shines and starts to show a quantitative impact. We’ve already seen legal aid professionals adopting AI at twice the rate of the broader legal industry, mirroring rapid adoption trends in the broader nonprofit sector. New, fit-for-purpose AI solutions have popped up every few months in 2025, addressing needs from voice-assisted legal information to resolving small claims disputes.

In this next year, we will start to see the fruits of those experiments – more people getting legal help affordably, more innovators learning from the first movers to build better and more localized solutions for the biggest legal needs they see, and public interest legal teams being able to help more clients and spend more time on the uniquely human parts of their jobs.

Joanne Sprague, Senior Director, Everlaw for Good

Doug Austin: AI-generated content will become the newest mainstream form of modern data that ediscovery professionals must address

In 2026, AI-generated content will become the newest mainstream form of modern data that ediscovery professionals must address. We’re already seeing a rapidly growing share of enterprise content that is being created or assisted by generative AI tools like ChatGPT and other LLM–based chatbots, with billions of prompts being submitted worldwide each month. A significant portion of that activity is “shadow AI” where employees are using public AI tools without official approval from their IT teams, creating additional challenges for ediscovery professionals looking to identify data sources for discovery.

At the same time, Microsoft is deeply embedding Copilot into Microsoft 365, Teams, and other productivity tools, where it routinely generates a variety of AI-authored artifacts that may be relevant data in litigation or investigations. Additionally, AI note takers and meeting assistants are generating content as an automatic byproduct of collaboration. Tools that join Zoom, Teams, and other calls as virtual participants are now recording, transcribing, summarizing, and tagging meetings by default, preserving everything from high-level summaries to action-item lists and sentiment-style insights.

All these examples illustrate how the content generated by various AI-related activities must be considered by ediscovery professionals at the outset of each case, and we will see more cases in 2026 where these various forms of AI-generated content will be important evidence in litigation and investigations.

Doug Austin, Editor, eDiscovery Today