As 2026 begins, The National Law Review surveyed 85 legal professionals across legal practice, academia, and the legal technology sector to assess how AI is expected to shape the profession in the year ahead. This year’s survey builds on The National Law Review’s prior annual predictions, including its 2025 edition.

To ground this year’s inquiry, respondents were first asked a series of baseline questions addressing four core issues: the likelihood of near-term artificial general intelligence (AGI), the potential replacement of entry-level lawyers, appropriate disciplinary responses to fabricated AI-generated filings, and whether U.S. law schools are adequately preparing students for an AI-enabled practice.

SURVEY OVERVIEW

The survey responses reflect a strong consensus that AGI will not be achieved in 2026, with 77.4% of respondents answering in the negative. Respondents also largely rejected the view that AI will replace entry-level lawyers within the next five years, with 58.3% answering in the negative. Only 20.2% believed replacement is likely, while 13.1% were unsure, reflecting skepticism about near-term displacement despite rapid advances in legal AI.

Survey responses also reflect a clear view that law schools are not keeping pace with preparing students for modern technology, as 84% of respondents identified “significant gaps” or outright inadequacy in educating law students on technology.

By contrast, respondents were more divided on whether lawyers who submit fabricated, AI-generated citations or filings should be disbarred, with 48.1% opposing disbarment and 19.5% supporting it, reflecting a lack of consensus on whether discipline should escalate beyond the more commonplace monetary penalties and state bar discipline referrals to date.

(View Full Survey Questions and Results)

Editor’s Note on Survey Methodology and Limitations 

The survey respondents were drawn from the editor’s professional network and do not represent an even or randomized cross-section of the legal profession. Nor do the survey respondents represent an even or randomized cross-section across different legal roles (e.g., academia, law firms, in-house legal departments, etc.). As a result, these survey results should not be treated as statistically reliable indicators of broader sentiment across the legal industry. Respondents, on average, have significantly greater exposure to, and proficiency with, artificial intelligence than the typical practicing lawyer. Eighty-four respondents participated in the survey portion. Responses to the first two questions were required; later questions were optional, and percentages may not total 100 percent due to rounding. These material limitations should be kept firmly in mind before drawing conclusions or making representations based on the survey results.

PREDICTIONS FOR 2026

Respondents were asked to look ahead and share their predictions for 2026, as well as what they believe will be the most surprising developments in the year to come. The 85 responses, plus the author’s predictions, are presented in full, offering an unfiltered view into how leaders across the legal and legal technology communities expect the AI landscape to evolve.

Predictions from The National Law Review’s Editor-in-Chief Oliver Roberts

Oliver’s Prediction 1: Courts Will Adopt a Mandatory “Hyperlink Rule” to Combat the Epidemic of Lawyers Filing AI-Hallucinated Authorities

The number of documented cases in which lawyers have filed pleadings containing fabricated legal authorities continues to grow, now exceeding 729 reported instances. In response, courts are likely to adopt a more effective prophylactic mechanism: a mandatory Hyperlink Rule requiring every cited judicial opinion, statute, or regulation to be hyperlinked to a reputable legal research database or official government repository, such as Westlaw, Lexis, Bloomberg Law, or an official court or agency website.

To date, courts have attempted to address AI-hallucinated filings through standing orders and local rules mandating AI disclosures or certifications. These measures, however, largely duplicate existing obligations under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11, which already requires attorneys to ensure the accuracy of all filings. Courts have also relied on sanctions, but the persistence of more than 729 documented incidents suggests that their deterrent effect, standing alone, may be limited.

Absent more effective alternatives, courts may adopt a rule that affirmatively compels verification at the point of filing. A mandatory Hyperlink Rule does precisely that. As explained in my proposal introducing the Hyperlink Rule, the approach is self-executing, technologically neutral, and imposes minimal burden on counsel while materially conserving judicial resources. Most importantly, it converts existing Rule 11 obligations from a back-end enforcement mechanism into a front-end control that prevents nonexistent authorities from entering the judicial record.

Oliver’s Prediction 2: Emergence of Universal Basic Income in National Political Debate Due to AI Layoffs

By late 2026, as candidates begin to declare for the 2028 presidential election, I expect at least one major-party candidate to openly advocate for Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a direct response to purported AI-related job losses. That endorsement would effectively move UBI from the political periphery into sustained national debate.

Whether AI is, in fact, the primary driver of recent mass layoffs remains contested. Some companies have explicitly attributed workforce reductions to AI-driven automation, while others, including Amazon, have been less explicit in identifying AI as the root cause. From a business perspective, attributing layoffs to efficiency gains from AI may offer a more favorable narrative to investors than acknowledging broader economic or operational miscalculations.

The causal relationship between AI adoption and mass layoffs is therefore far from settled. That uncertainty, however, is unlikely to constrain political messaging. Politicians are already framing AI-related job displacement as an emerging economic threat. Some politicians will assert that UBI directly addresses concerns over job insecurity and technological disruption by guaranteeing baseline income irrespective of employment status.

UBI previously entered the national conversation during the 2020 election cycle, most prominently through Democratic candidate Andrew Yang. As AI-driven workforce narratives continue to gain traction, UBI is likely to reemerge as a central policy proposal in the lead-up to the 2028 election.

Oliver’s Prediction 3: Escalating China-U.S. Tensions Over Taiwan May Drive Congressional Acceptance of Federal Preemption of State AI Laws

As Chinese ambitions toward Taiwan intensify, Congress may be forced in 2026 to reconsider its longstanding resistance to federal preemption of state AI regulations.

On New Year’s Eve, Chinese President Xi Jinping again reiterated China’s objective of annexing Taiwan, a self-governed democracy whose strategic importance to the U.S. extends beyond regional security. Taiwan is the center of advanced semiconductor manufacturing, and continued U.S. leadership in AI depends on reliable access to Taiwan-manufactured chips. Chinese aggression toward Taiwan, and any resulting disruption to Taiwan’s manufacturing capabilities, would have direct and material effects on U.S. AI development and deployment, implicating core national security interests.

As Chinese pressure on Taiwan increases, AI development is likely to be viewed less as a consumer protection issue and more as a matter of national security and industrial capacity. That reframing carries significant legal consequences. State regulation of foundational AI models and of the infrastructure that supports them (including data centers, advanced chip manufacturing, and large-scale compute deployment) will increasingly be seen as strategic liabilities rather than legitimate exercises of state power.

In this environment, Congress will likely acquiesce to federal preemption of state AI laws—but with a compromise. States will retain authority over downstream, consumer-facing AI applications and sector-specific uses, while regulation at the model layer consolidates at the federal level.

Oliver’s Prediction 4: Early Quantum Computing Experiments in Legal Technology

In 2026, I expect the first legal technology company to explore quantum computing on a pilot basis to ascertain viable applications in the legal field.

Quantum computing remains economically and technically immature relative to large language models. Its integration into legal practice will therefore be slower and more constrained. However, recent breakthroughs suggest that commercially viable use cases are beginning to emerge, and legal tech will test them early, even if only at the margins.

This experimentation will receive far less attention than LLM adoption, but quantum computing will matter more in the long run and eventually be a far more transformative technology.

 

Predictions from Legal Practice, Academia, and Technology

Bridget McCormack | President and CEO, American Arbitration Association

2026 Prediction: 2026 is the year parties will start choosing AI as the decision-maker for defined categories of disputes. For the first time, parties will opt in to governed, auditable AI decision systems for some disputes because they can show their work and deliver fast, transparent, low-cost resolutions. Companies will begin using AI neutrals as a first step in their dispute processes or for specific slices of their portfolios where efficiency and neutrality matter most. Humans will still design, oversee, and audit the systems, but 2026 is the year parties stop asking whether AI can decide disputes, will recognize that it can increasingly help parties resolve for better, and start choosing it when it makes sense.

Biggest Surprise 2026: The biggest surprise in legal AI in 2026 will be the pace of change. As stakeholders grow trust in AI systems across their lives, they will likewise grow trust in AI systems that scale legal work. When governed, auditable platforms can show stakeholders their legal and dispute resolution work, trust will accelerate.

 

Allison Goddard | U.S. Magistrate Judge, Southern District of California

2026 Prediction: AI will become the hot topic for CLE programs, and state bar associations will consider adopting a "tech" speciality requirement if they don't have one already. Lawyers who cite AI hallucinations in briefs should attend an AI-focused CLE program ASAP after the hallucination is detected to demonstrate they are taking responsibility for the error. Lawyers who "double down" on the error (yes, lawyers have actually cited AI hallucinations in their response to OSCs re sanctions for citing to AI hallucinations) will face very tough sanctions.

Biggest Surprise 2026: The Advisory Committee on Civil Rules will propose a new and separate rule addressing sanctions for citing to AI hallucinations in court filings.

 

Kevin Werbach | Liem Sioe Liong/First Pacific Company Professor, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

2026 Prediction: Best of times, worst of times. Even though it will be the time that AI agents actually start driving significant productivity benefits for many businesses and users, 2026 will be the trough of disillusionment year for AI. There will be an AI-led stock market downturn, although it may be short. There will also be a spectacular AI-based crime, hack, or perhaps a failure of an agentic system causing losses in the billions of dollars. While initially provoking greater skepticism about AI, in the longer term, such incidents will be helpful in promoting needed investments in AI governance. On the legal front, the AI copyright issue around mass-scale data scraping will be effectively resolved through a combination of private settlements, licensing deals, and micropayments. And the US Congress will actually pass legislation addressing some AI risks at the federal level.

Biggest Surprise 2026: Congress will take some action.

 

Scott Milner | Partner and eData Practice Leader, Morgan Lewis

2026 Prediction: Smarter AI Makes Validation the Competitive Advantage – As legal AI outputs continue to improve; this makes hallucinations harder, not easier, to detect. The risk continues to shift from obviously wrong answers to confidently delivered, plausibly incorrect ones that evade surface-level review. As a result, the differentiator may not be which AI a firm uses, but output validation. Human-in-the-loop workflows, QC, and defensible review processes will become core legal competencies, not optional safeguards, with successful teams treating AI as a tool that accelerates work but still requires supervision and oversight. Tool Overload Will Force Legal to Choose Judgment Over Hype – Legal organizations will continue to face peak AI tool overload, with an abundance of products claiming to solve every problem, but without the human in the loop, few clearly are aligned out of the box for specific legal workflows. Competitive advantage will move away from acquiring more technology and toward having the expertise to evaluate which tools actually solve the problem at hand. It will be important that legal teams define the legal issue first, understand where friction exists, and have evaluators who actually understand how the tools work and which tool actually helps solve the issue identified. The winners will not be those organization with the largest AI stacks, but those that deploy fewer, better-chosen tools with clear purpose, adoption, and measurable impact. 

Biggest Surprise 2026: Despite all the news and awareness surrounding AI hallucinations, lawyers who do not understand how to use AI will, unfortunately, continue to have issues identifying and addressing hallucinations.

 

Austen Parrish | Dean and Chancellor's Professor, University of California, Irvine School of Law; 2025 President, Association of American Law Schools

2026 Prediction: AI is not slowing down and the legal profession will continue to demand tech-savvy law graduates. We will continue to see: fast-paced experimentation and innovation with AI in law schools, including how faculty teach the use of legal technology in skills-based, drafting, and clinical courses; the growth of AI and technology-focused institutes and centers focused on research around the impact in substantive areas of the law and around professional responsibilities; and discussion and analysis of how AI is changing the legal profession and the provision of legal services. We’ll continue to see interest in how technology may help reduce persistent access to judge gaps and legal deserts.

Biggest Surprise 2026: The biggest surprise may be the lack of big surprises: there will be evolution and new technology, but I’d be surprised if the AI bubble bursts or we see massive disruption in 2026, rather than continued adoption and integration. Legal education will continue to integrate Generative AI as part of practical-skills training, much of the analysis of how AI may change the role of junior lawyers and their practices will continue, and we’ll continue to see concern over the use or misuse of AI in legal proceedings.

 

Ken Withers | Executive Director, The Sedona Conference

2026 Prediction: Several state bar associations and Supreme Courts will follow Arizona's lead and add to their Rules of Professional Conduct a duty of counsel to reasonably investigate the provenance of video, audio, screenshots, or other digital documents before they are offered to the court as evidence. Commentators will correctly point out the practical problems associated with identifying possible “deep fakes” or enforcing such a duty, but it will put the bar on notice and provide a basis for disciplining repeated or egregious violations.

Biggest Surprise 2026: The biggest surprise for me will be if lawyers STOP citing fictitious case law, statutes, or regulations generated by Artificial Intelligence. I’m not holding out much hope that sanctions, shaming, or remedial training will significantly improve professional conduct in this regard.

 

Kirk Nahra | Partner and Co-Chair, Cybersecurity and Privacy Practice as well as Co-Chair, Artificial Intelligence Practice, WilmerHale

2026 Prediction: The pace of acceleration of usage will exceed the quality controls. This will mean that companies will make lots of mistakes. The companies doing the best job with their workforce will have meaningful controls on how AI is used for anything significant, without having these controls get too much in the way.

Biggest Surprise 2026: Even if the federal government drops out of AI regulation and enforcement for a while, the states will regulate more aggressively (and with a long-term memory over the next several years).

 

Sonia Cissé | Partner, Linklaters Paris

2026 Prediction: My key predictions are increased scrutiny from data protection and competition authorities on AI, the emergence of sector-specific guidance for high-risk AI uses, and discussions around creating a new legal regime for agentic AI.

Biggest Surprise 2026: A complete rollback of AI regulation, going even further than what is envisaged under the Omnibus package.

 

Dennis Kennedy | Professor Emeritus at Michigan State University and an Adjunct Professor at University of Michigan Law School

2026 Prediction: In 2026, legal organizations will discover what Sherlock Holmes practiced as "the science of deduction.” You can't solve the case until you've observed the details others miss. Right now, firms are deploying AI through the lens of FOMO without observing their actual workflows, client needs, or success metrics. The turning point will finally come when we apply deductive reasoning to AI adoption, starting with specific, observable problems and working backwards to appropriate tools, rather than starting with AI solutions and hoping they fit somewhere and help us in some mystical way. The consulting industry calls this "digital transformation." Holmes and I would call that common sense.

Biggest Surprise 2026: AI is not a search engine or an answer machine, but it can be, if used well, an excellent thought partner.

 

Colin Levy | General Counsel, Malbek

2026 Prediction: There will be more and more clients expecting their lawyers to be using AI and, importantly, to be transparent with clients about use of AI. GenAI governance will be of upmost concern, and Gen AI policies will be even more carefully considered and implemented.

Biggest Surprise 2026: The increased agency on the part of individuals to take things into their own hands with AI.

 

Renee Henson | Associate Professor of Law, University of Missouri School of Law

2026 Prediction: Within eighteen months, AI will so thoroughly permeate legal education that students will scarcely recall a time without it. Every brief, outline, argument, and analytic move will pass through an AI layer as reflexively as they now consult Google. This transformation will not merely enhance pedagogy; it will rewire how students reason, solve problems, and imagine the law. The first truly AI-native lawyers will enter practice—and they will remake the profession with startling speed.

Biggest Surprise 2026: By 2026, the biggest surprise will be how little resistance students show to AI-driven legal training—not just for writing, but for simulating clients, judges, and even adversaries. What once seemed like academic dishonesty will have become the pedagogical norm.

 

Joseph Tiano | President & Founder of Legal Decoder | Adjunct Professor at Arizona State University Law School

2026 Prediction: Law firms will have a mindset change whereby they will stop viewing AI as an existential threat, but instead embrace AI adoption as a business development differentiator. They will realize that AI enables law firms to evolve their hourly rate economic model to a hybrid value-based economic model combining hourly rates (for bespoke advisory work) and task based/fixed rates for more commodified work that AI enables. Quite paradoxically, this is going to have a positive effect on the “client/firm” relationship and will enable law firms to deliver greater value to clients at more rationale price while becoming more profitable. In this new model, firms will better understand how to (re)train junior legal professionals to serve clients and firms better.

Biggest Surprise 2026: The headline-grabbing scandals around AI misuse by lawyers will be replaced by equally newsworthy "scandals" of deepfakes being used in litigation to deceive the finders of fact.

 

Doug Devitre | Founder and President, CoTrackPro

2026 Prediction: The biggest surprise in legal AI in 2026 will be how normal it becomes for families and professionals to rely on AI as a first-line co-pilot for organizing evidence, drafting communications, and modeling case outcomes—especially in messy, high-conflict situations. What will really shock the system isn’t a new model, but new guardrails: courts, bar associations, and platforms like CoTrackPro baking in transparency, bias checks, and child-centered safeguards so “using AI” becomes synonymous with being more ethical, not less.

Biggest Surprise 2026: The biggest surprise in legal AI in 2026 will be how quickly it shifts from “drafting helper” to “dynamic collaborator” that can reason over live evidence, transcripts, and records in real time while humans stay firmly in control of decisions. Equally unexpected: regulators and courts will start requiring provable transparency and audit trails for AI tools, making “explainable by design” a competitive advantage instead of a marketing slogan.

 

Kevin Frazier | AI Innovation & Law Fellow, The University of Texas School of Law

2026 Prediction: 2026 will see a flood of state AI bills that creates a regulatory tower of babble—laws with different definitions, standards, and mandates. This will increase popular and private sector pressure on Congress to act and pass a true national framework.

Biggest Surprise 2026: We will see a major AI company leave California.

 

Jiyun Hyo | CEO, Givance

2026 Prediction: People are still treating AI as an add-on. AI-native, end-to-end workflows will truly transform the way people think about approaching AI.

Biggest Surprise 2026: AI-native MSOs will emerge and grow much faster than people anticipate.

 

Shaun G. Jamison | Associate Dean of Academics, Purdue Global Law School

2026 Prediction: There will be no significant U.S. federal regulation of AI. Start ups that focus on creating and marketing solutions rather than how they use AI will be the most successful. Lawyers and others will continue to submit hallucinated law and information. Law schools will increase incorporating AI into their curriculum.

Biggest Surprise 2026: Resistance to data centers and investor nervousness about returns will cause a cooling of investment.

 

Dorna Moini | CEO & Founder, Gavel

2026 Prediction: The fragmentation of AI in legal. In 2026, the legal market will pull away from general-purpose legal AI toward domain-specific AI built for discrete legal subfields. The firms and legal departments that adopt specialized tools for their practice areas will outperform those trying to retrofit broad legal tech platforms.

Biggest Surprise 2026: In-house counsel will discover through AI that a large chunk of their workload is operational or business logic, not legal risk assessment. AI will triage and route it accordingly.

 

Latia Ward | Research Librarian, University of Virginia School of Law

2026 Prediction: Librarians and other instructors of legal research will begin mentioning Generative AI tools on the first day of class and integrating these tools throughout their lessons instead of separating the discussion of Generative AI tools into separate lessons. Moreover, the discussion of Generative AI tools in the legal research classroom will not be limited to how these tools can speed up work by creating the first draft or suggesting primary and secondary sources. Every discussion of AI will include the pros and cons of using Generative AI tools for a legal research task.

Biggest Surprise 2026: Those working in the field of access to justice will continue to recommend apps that use AI to self-represented litigants, and even those who work in courts will recommend using these tools under appropriate guidelines.

 

Amy J. Schmitz | Professor & John Deaver Drinko-Baker & Hostetler Chair in Law and Director, JusticeTech, The Ohio State Moritz College of Law

2026 Prediction: Agentic AI and AI agents will get smarter and grow in use and acceptance. However, more voices will raise regarding the need for better guidance on risk management and more uniform standards worldwide. This will continue to be a challenge but is worthy of addressing.

Biggest Surprise 2026: Not sure if this is a surprise, but the funding for AI is likely to slow, especially on the investor side, as some investors see that not all startups are a wise investment.

 

Keith Clark | CEO, JuryAnalyst

2026 Prediction: We'll see a decisive split between firms using AI as a genuine competitive advantage and those treating it as a checkbox feature. The litigation space specifically will move beyond document review into predictive analytics that actually influence case strategy—jury selection, venue analysis, and real-time trial adjustments. Expect regulators to start paying closer attention, but meaningful rules are still 18+ months out. The firms that win will be those pairing AI capabilities with proprietary, high-quality data rather than relying on generic models.

Biggest Surprise 2026: The surprise won't be what AI can do; it'll be how many "AI-powered" legal products turn out to be vaporware built on junk data. Buyers will get smarter about demanding methodology transparency, and we'll see some prominent failures that reset expectations.

 

Seth J. Chandler | Foundation Professor of Law, University of Houston Law Center

2026 Prediction: Google enters the legal research market in a big way, harnessing its immense dataset. Midpage AI permits API access to its research capabilities; a model beats established human authors in a brief writing competition (a Deep Blue moment).

Biggest Surprise 2026: There will be the equivalent of AIStudio or Claude Code, but for legal research and writing.

 

Kevin Lee | Founding Director, The Institute for AI and Democratic Government

2026 Prediction: The Clio-vLex merger signals the arrival of the first "full-stack" legal cognition engine, enabling agents to close the “action-perception loop” and actively minimize the “surprise” of legal error. Simultaneously, courts will likely enforce an “Anti-Switching Presumption” to prevent tech companies from exploiting the doctrinal collapse between privacy and copyright law when defining their data rights.

Biggest Surprise 2026: AI vendors to abandon opaque “black box” models in favor of explicit architectures to actively resolve the conflict between privacy and copyright law. This regulatory shock will shift the industry from “Code is Law” to “Law as Physics,” where digital agents are valued for minimizing “normative surprise” through auditable, goal-directed behavior, not for “generating text.”

 

Daniel Lewis | CEO, LegalOn

2026 Prediction: If current trends continue, foundational models may be nearly 4x better at the end of 2026 than at the start. In legal, that will translate to an increase in accuracy and capabilities, allowing people to use AI for more tasks. Products will continue to improve on top, product value will increase, and user adoption will continue to grow as a result.

Biggest Surprise 2026: More partnerships and acquisitions.

 

Electra Japonas | Chief Legal Officer, SimpleDocs

2026 Prediction: Context in AI will become everything. LLMs on their own will no longer cut in for Legal. AI users will realise that introducing their own context (playbooks, precedents, templates, preferred legislation) will become the main driver of value when it comes to the use of AI in their processes.

Biggest Surprise 2026: I think the biggest surprise will be that we will have to go back to basics first, before we can truly move forward. Data sanitization, process optimisation and defining roles and responsibilities (including where AI sits) will be the fundamental building blocks for AI transformation.

 

Michael Goodyear | Associate Professor, New York Law School

2026 Prediction: Copyright will remain the primary litigation battleground for AI in 2026. In 2025, we received the first fair use decisions involving training Generative AI models on copyrighted works. We are likely to have additional fair use decisions in 2026, but we should also be cognizant of negotiations in the background. There is no sign of training data licensing agreements between large rights owners and AI companies slowing down anytime soon.

Biggest Surprise 2026: The Class of 2026 will, by some metrics, be the first AI-native law school graduates because it was at least exposed to Lexis and Westlaw’s Generative AI tools for research during 1L, and many law schools first considered incorporating AI research into their legal writing curriculums during this year. It will be a pivotal moment to see if and how new attorneys will use the panoply of legal AI tools that have emerged in the last few years.

 

Christian Puzder | CEO Casefriend

2026 Prediction: 2026 will be the year AI stops being a separate tool and becomes the integrated backbone of legal practice. Bespoke Small Language Models will redefine competitive advantage, giving even boutique firms the power and precision once reserved for giants. AI will live inside every workflow – document management, billing, and case management – transforming static systems into powerful insight engines. Attorneys and law firms will look to AI for foresight more than generative tasks, as predictive analytics and ethical standards shape an increasingly data-driven legal industry.

Biggest Surprise 2026: The biggest surprise in legal AI for 2026 will be how many attorneys leave established firms, or even skip them entirely out of law school, to launch their own practices powered by AI-native tools. With automation and intelligent workflows leveling the playing field, solo and small firms will scale faster than anyone expected, reshaping the traditional partner model.

 

Zihao Jiang | Co-Founder, legion.law

2026 Prediction: General-purpose legal AI is dead. By the end of 2026, we'll see the market split into 20+ hyper-specialized AI products—one for patent prosecution, one for M&A diligence, one for employment disputes. The “do everything” platforms will get outcompeted by vertical specialists with better training data and workflows.

Biggest Surprise 2026: Small law firms will leapfrog BigLaw in AI adoption by mid-2026. Without legacy systems and committee decision-making slowing them down, solo practitioners and boutiques will deploy autonomous AI agents that make them competitive with 100-person firms on complex matters.

 

Kris Turner | Associate Director of Public Services and Teaching Faculty, University of Wisconsin Law School

2026 Prediction: Proprietary data will become even more important as major players move to consolidate their control over the AI agent market. As the major players get access to more data, agentic AI will become more commonplace, and the average user will struggle to keep up with the newest technology. To that end, AI literacy and education, both in law school and beyond, will become extremely important with upcoming elections and job markets that will likely be heavily impacted by AI-generated images and information.

Biggest Surprise 2026: Some AI litigation will require companies to put guardrails in place when a user appears to become too close with the AI bot in an attempt to prevent more instances of self-harm or AI psychosis.

 

Debbie Reynolds | Founder and Chief Data Strategist, Debbie Reynolds Consulting LLC; Host, The Data Diva Talks Privacy Podcast

2026 Prediction: In 2026, legal AI will shift decisively from experimentation to operational dependency, with firms expected to demonstrate not just adoption but governance, validation, and accountability. Organizations will prioritize AI systems that are auditable, explainable, and aligned with legal and regulatory obligations, rather than general-purpose tools. Data governance, retention discipline, and provenance controls will become competitive differentiators, not compliance afterthoughts. Legal teams that fail to operationalize responsible AI controls will face growing regulatory, reputational, and litigation risk.

Biggest Surprise 2026: One of the biggest surprises in 2026 will be increased pressure on attorneys to justify fees based on value delivered rather than billable hours, as AI-driven efficiencies become more visible to clients. As organizations realize measurable productivity gains from AI, traditional billing models will face heightened scrutiny and growing resistance.

 

Remco Visser | Co-Founder, Saga

2026 Prediction: AI is already extremely powerful, and by the end of 2026, the need for extensive prompt training will largely disappear. Competitive advantage will shift from technical expertise to organisational adoption. Legal organisations will find this transition especially difficult, yet the clear economic rewards will force transformation sooner than expected, accelerated by the rise of AI-first law firms. The core challenge will be reinventing the business while continuing to operate, like changing the wheels on a moving car.

Biggest Surprise 2026: Due to deterministic checks and reasoning models/infrastructure, hallucinations will not be one of the top problems anymore, especially if you give the AI the right context.

 

Kathleen (Katie) Brown | Associate Dean for Information Resources & Faculty, Charleston School of Law

2026 Prediction: As we enter this year, judges and law firms increasingly expect the legal academy to address Generative AI. They look to law schools to prepare students to use these tools responsibly and effectively before joining them for summer positions. This heightened expectation may stem from recent AI-related sanctioning orders, which highlight the risks of misuse. Instruction must go beyond tool instruction and include ethics, accuracy, and professional competence. Our role as educators is to ensure graduates understand both the opportunities and the risks, equipping them to use Generative AI with integrity.

Biggest Surprise 2026: Greater expectations from clients around Generative AI. We will see a call for direct engagement with their legal services through AI enabled workflows.

 

Ross Guberman | Founder and CEO, BriefCatch

2026 Prediction: The profession will realize that higher-level legal reasoning combines logic and pattern recognition in a way that lends itself to higher-level GenAI point solutions.

Biggest Surprise 2026: Products that embed true subject-matter expertise will outpace those that streamline processes.

 

Ed Boal | General Counsel & Chief Domain Expert, StructureFlow

2026 Prediction: The focus will shift from AI that can review inputs and produce outputs faster to AI that helps lawyers and clients understand complex matters more quickly, synthesising information into visual formats rather than generating more text. Competitive advantage will therefore emerge from recognising that client value lies in comprehending complexity, not just processing it.

Biggest Surprise 2026: How much AI adoption will be driven by clients rather than firms. In-house teams will increasingly mandate specific AI-enabled workflows and outputs as a condition of instruction. This presents an opportunity for firms to provide a relational, embedded managed service offering paired with top-flight experience and expertise.

 

Rose J. Hunter Jones | Partner, Hilgers PLLC

2026 Prediction: In 2026, many legal departments will no longer debate whether to adopt Generative AI but how fast they can scale it, and the firms that thrive will be the ones that already built defensible, metrics-driven workflows grounded in a decade of TAR, CAL, and enterprise-grade governance. As companies tie legal budgets directly to business-side AI efficiencies, outside counsel will be pushed to deliver the same operational excellence, which means human-in-the-loop GenAI will become a baseline expectation rather than an innovation story. Many major corporations will update their outside counsel guidelines to account for the use of AI, including required AI protocols, audit trails, and role-based controls.

Biggest Surprise 2026: The biggest surprise in legal AI in 2026 will be how quickly Generative AI moves from “assistant” to decision-support engine, powering early case assessments, privilege analysis, and narrative drafting with accuracy levels that rival seasoned attorneys. The other shock will be that the firms winning the most business aren’t the biggest; they’re the ones with airtight governance, defensibility frameworks, and repeatable AI workflows that clients can trust.

 

Laura Bingenheimer | CEO, MagNet Agents

2026 Prediction: Law firms will increasingly focus on improving the business of law through AI-powered technologies. After aggressively rolling out legal AI tools on the practice of law side, they are likely to realize that their ways of working have changed and that billable hours per matter are shrinking. As a result, firms will need to think more strategically about how to remain competitive and attract new business.

Biggest Surprise 2026: The biggest surprise in legal AI in 2026 will be how quickly firms realize that efficiency gains from legal AI create revenue pressure, forcing them to rethink pricing and business development.

 

Nathan Holmes | Of Counsel, Boles Holmes White LLC

2026 Prediction: The core shift in 2026 is not simply that lawyers will use AI more, but that the nature of legal work will change. The most valuable skill will be problem framing and workflow design rather than rote legal execution. Lawyers will approach matters the way technologists approach projects: diagnosing the problem, selecting tools, deciding what can be automated, and where human judgment is essential. The lawyer’s role will increasingly resemble a systems architect who designs, supervises, and validates AI-assisted legal work.

Biggest Surprise 2026: Firms will discover that two lawyers using the same AI tools can get radically different results based on how they frame the task. As a result, AI advantage will concentrate in individuals and teams with strong systems thinking rather than in firms that simply buy the best software; the gap between “AI-native” lawyers and everyone else will widen faster than expected.

 

Ken Priore | Deputy General Counsel at Docusign

2026 Prediction: In 2026, legal AI will shift from standalone agents to workflow-embedded systems where governance, auditability, and human review are designed from the start. The most successful legal AI tools won’t maximize autonomy – they’ll constrain it through structured workflows that define what AI can access, decide, and produce at each step. Regulation and enterprise risk demands will accelerate this shift, making explainability and traceability table stakes rather than add-ons. Legal teams that understand workflows as governance infrastructure – not just efficiency tools – will lead adoption.

Biggest Surprise 2026: The biggest surprise will be that workflows – not just agents – become the primary control surface for legal AI governance. Firms will discover that embedding AI into structured, logged processes delivers more trust and ROI than deploying increasingly autonomous systems.

 

Ryan McDonough | Head of Engineering, KPMG Law – Global Legal Solutions

2026 Prediction: By 2026, legal AI will be judged less on interface quality and more on operational discipline: evaluation, auditability, and predictable behaviour in real legal workflows. Agentic systems will be common, but tightly constrained, with clear handoffs, escalation points, and human sign-off where legal risk sits. Procurement will harden, with buyers demanding task-level evidence, traceability of outputs, and clarity on data handling rather than generic capability claims. Hybrid architectures will dominate, combining local or private models for sensitive tasks with hosted models for heavier drafting and reasoning.

Biggest Surprise 2026: The biggest surprise will be how many AI pilots quietly fail not due to model quality, but because firms underestimated governance, workflow design, and change management. The gap between "AI works" and "AI is trusted" will become impossible to ignore.

 

Amanda Levendowski Tepski | Professor of Law, Georgetown Law

2026 Prediction: Communities will organize against new AI data centers, and they’ll often win.

Biggest Surprise 2026: Law firms still hyping AI uncritically despite evidence of its environmental, disinformation, and equity harms.

 

Joe Regalia | Associate Professor of Law, William S. Boyd School of Law at University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Founder, Write.law

2026 Prediction: By 2026, the most valuable legal AI will be tools that work directly with lawyers, not abstract systems that require technical translation. These tools will sit inside everyday work—documents, emails, deal folders, briefs—and learn from a lawyer’s own examples, edits, and preferences, without complicated setup or intermediaries. Lawyers will shape outcomes by showing the system what “good” looks like, not by configuring software or calling IT. The firms that win will be the ones that use AI to scale their distinct judgment and standards, so every draft reflects how they actually practice.

Biggest Surprise 2026: The biggest surprise will be that clients, not law firms, force AI maturity. Sophisticated clients will demand faster, more consistent work product and quietly reward firms that use AI to systematize quality.

 

Robert Klamser | Chief Innovation Officer, Stretto

2026 Prediction: I predict that we will see increased effort by Congress to streamline AI legislation at a federal level, but we will not see any major federal laws passed, and states will continue to develop a patchwork of AI regulation. Similar to how Google didn't eliminate the need for doctors after people self-diagnosed their symptoms, the increased adoption of AI in the legal space won't reduce attorney hours, but instead will put more focus on quality professionals producing high-value work. AI will lead people to asking more questions of attorneys, not less.

Biggest Surprise 2026: When we look back in December 2026, the biggest surprise will be that 2026 didn't look all that different than 2025. AI isn't going to revolutionize the industry overnight. Change will be gradual and incremental, contrary to some of the messaging that tech firms are sending to attorneys.

 

Michele Neitz | Visiting Professor of Law/ Founding Director, Center for Law, Tech, and Social Good at the University of San Francisco School of Law

2026 Prediction: Adoption of legal AI tech will continue to spread rapidly, especially among in-house counsel and attorneys in small to mid-size firms. Law school graduates who understand how to use AI responsibly will have the edge in an evolving job market. There will be double the amount of AI legal tech startups in December 2026.

Biggest Surprise 2026: Agentic AI will finally become reality in law firms, beginning with billing and discovery tasks.

 

Daksh Saroha | Tutorial Faculty, BITS Law School, Mumbai

2026 Prediction: Safe bets: Exams, assessments, and assignments will change dramatically in legal education due to AI's ability to handle simple legal problems easily. Hot take: Common law countries will move towards a civil law approach due to aggregation of legal principles into simple, actionable (AI) model agents. Hot take: Harmful impact on kids will lead to stricter regulation, just like social media. (This is a hot take not because it is the obvious direction of progression; but rather due to regulatory lethargy and reluctance).

Biggest Surprise 2026: I think the surprise might be AI integration might no longer be free (exhaustion of predatory market capturing. Now it would be time to recoup costs). Another surprise would be the integration of AI in judicial processes (at least cut and dry cases like those in small causes court) and those decisions having a binding value.

 

Peter Ambrose | Managing Director, The Partnership Property Lawyers

2026 Prediction: The use of legal AI will grow exponentially next year, given the speed with which solutions can be developed. However, the current era of "thin-wrappers" around generic AI models will quickly be replaced by vertical-specific solutions.

Biggest Surprise 2026: A law firm will successfully defend a case where they have used AI in their decision-making.

 

Jaime Pesquera | General Counsel, Tappa, Inc.

2026 Prediction: Specialized legal AI tools will see considerable growth among large and medium-sized firms consistent with LLM enhancements; the rest of practicing attorneys will probably continue to adopt horizontal tools or general use LLMs. Attorneys and recent grads will start looking for alternative career paths in other sectors and in-house, although the firm path won't dry up – there will be less entry-level openings nonetheless. As prototyping and coding become more accessible to non-technical attorneys, we will see a wave or influx of new startups led by attorneys. I predict some law schools will have issues with candidate pools in 2026 and 2027 as people will begin to look for other careers.

Biggest Surprise 2026: I think we will see AI being used more in the courtrooms and inside judges' chambers (and in arbitration, for that matter). There will be a lot of debate on whether or not we should let AI influence a judge's decisions, worries about AI output in deciding cases; pre-trained, established patterns will probably create more challenges on the basis that people are not receiving fair trials.

 

Michael Grupp | CEO, BRYTER

2026 Prediction: 2026 will need to show value: AI will move from individual enablement – through Chat Assistants – to more powerful use cases. Through Agents, Workflows and specific tools.

Biggest Surprise 2026: For many use cases, AI alone is not enough. Workflows will be key. Also, we will realize that we need to focus on specific problems.

 

Gary Marchant | Regents Professor, Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law, Arizona State University

2026 Prediction: Multiple states will follow the lead of Arizona and amend their Code of Judicial Conduct to expressly require technology competence for AI. In addition, a number of states will implement comment 8 to ethics rule 1.1 to require mandatory CLE on AI.

Biggest Surprise 2026: Growing number of people will seek to marry their chatbot.

 

Ziyaad Ahmed | Co-Founder, Qanooni AI

2026 Prediction: In 2026, legal AI will move from standalone chat to workflow-native copilots inside Word and Outlook, drafting, redlining, and responding using matter context plus firm playbooks and tone. Verification becomes the product: citations to source, playbook-based checks, and audit trails will be standard because courts, clients, and insurers will not tolerate untraceable output. Regulation stays fragmented in the U.S., but EU-style transparency and documentation expectations will show up in procurement everywhere, forcing vendors to prove data boundaries, model governance, and accountability. The winners will treat AI as leverage and quality control, not a novelty, shifting junior time from first drafts to supervision and client-facing judgment, which accelerates flat-fee and value-based pricing.

Biggest Surprise 2026: The surprise in 2026 is that procurement becomes the real AI regulator: RFPs start requiring proof of data boundaries, governance, and reviewable audit trails for AI-assisted work product. Tools embedded in Word and Outlook with firm-specific controls get approved, generic chat tools get blocked.

 

Sujith Jose | CEO & Co-Founder, Candle AI

2026 Prediction: The legal industry can expect a surge in AI tools tailored to specific needs. Just as Clio and iManage cater to legal professionals, despite the existence of Salesforce and OneDrive, we'll see AI solutions emerge for various aspects of a lawyer's workflow. This includes drafting tools like EvenUp and Spellbook, legal research platforms like CoCounsel and Lexis+ AI, and communication tools like Hona and Candle AI. Moreover, companies will begin to take ownership of deliverables, rather than just products, marking a shift towards "service-as-a-software."

Biggest Surprise 2026: We might start to see early M&A activities as companies and products consolidate.

 

Fredric Lederer | Chancellor Professor of Law and Director, Center for Legal & Court Technology, William & Mary Law School

2026 Prediction: Lawyers will increasingly use and depend on AI, often without understanding the technology, including the risk that submitted data will be retained by the product. Given time pressure, lawyers will depend on AI summarization of large amounts of information without reading the original data. The general population will come to depend on AI legal information, rather than relying on human lawyers, at least for relatively simple matters. There will be continuing debate over how to price legal services generated at least in part by AI.

Biggest Surprise 2026: The extraordinary ability of enhanced AI-based legal research and the degree to which it will replace human research and drafting for both lawyers and judges.

 

Nancy Rapoport | UNLV Distinguished Professor & Garman Turner Gordon Professor of Law, Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada, Las Vegas  ||  Joseph R. Tiano, Jr. | Founder & President of Legal Decoder, Inc.

2026 Prediction: In 2026, BigLaw firms that want to differentiate themselves are going to have to rethink how they bill for the value of their services. GenAI is taking away the scutwork that formed the bottom of the traditional law firm pyramid, and let's not kid ourselves: billable hours were never a metric of the value of the work done, because billed time reflects inputs, not outputs, and it penalizes efficiency. Sophisticated firms that understand, going in, what a client is facing in a given matter should be able to figure out what their expertise adds to the situation and bill accordingly for that value-added work.

Biggest Surprise 2026: Joe and I have already predicted that, for most BigLaw firms, the traditional pyramid model is going to go the way of the dodo. There are a variety of other law firm "shapes" that will emerge, depending on a firm's particular expertise; litigation boutiques may be the exception to our prediction, but on the transactional side of the house, things have to change.

 

Gil Banyas | Co-Founder & COO, Chamelio

2026 Prediction: By 2026, legal AI will serve as the foundational layer for how legal work is done inside companies. It will sit beneath contracts, policies, and workflows, quietly powering review, decision-making, and execution at scale.

Biggest Surprise 2026: The biggest surprise will be how quickly legal teams stop “using” legal AI and simply assume it’s always there. It will fade into the background as infrastructure, while teams wonder how they ever worked without it.

 

Daryl Lim | H. Laddie Montague Jr. Chair in Law and Associate Dean for Research and Strategic Partnerships at Penn State Dickinson Law

2026 Prediction: Legal AI will feel more like part of the daily toolkit of legal practice, embedded in drafting, discovery, and compliance work. We'll see custom-built tools for specific areas of the law. Regulators will evolve toward concrete enforcement, especially around data use and market power. The harder question will be how AI's use changes professional judgment, responsibility, and who benefits from the efficiency gains.

Biggest Surprise 2026: The biggest surprise may be how uneven legal AI adoption turns out to be, with some practice areas unrecognizably transformed while others barely change.

 

Christopher Roederer | Interim Dean, University of Dayton School of Law

2026 Prediction: My prediction is that AI platforms and tools will continue to multiply over the next few years, and the profession, along with educational institutions, will continue to struggle to parse through the multitude of providers, platforms, and tools to find the best fit to meet needs and leverage skills and expertise. The profession will also continue to face problems with the unethical/unprofessional use of AI. While AI might have some negative impact on hiring, I predict that it will be negligible in the near future. The profession will need graduating students who understand the potential and limits of AI, who are equipped to use AI in their legal research and writing, and who can ethically and professionally use AI to serve clients.

Biggest Surprise 2026: The big surprise will be that there is no big surprise in 2026.

 

Michael Rosenberg | Managing Partner, ROIG Lawyers

2026 Prediction: AI adoption will slow down in 2026. Everyone has rushed into the market trying to out do each other. 2026 will see a more thoughtful approach

Biggest Surprise 2026: Several companies will close. Their products are just not distinct enough to compete in the market.

 

Julien Emery | CEO and Co-Founder, Superpanel.io

2026 Prediction: In 2026, legal AI will only be worth investing in if it can measurably improve the business outcomes that drive revenue and growth for law firms. Time saved will stop being a useful metric. Firms will evaluate AI on whether it improves conversion, decision quality, and cost per outcome (starting with intake, where revenue impact is immediate and measurable). As client expectations shift toward fast clarity on case eligibility, firms will need systems that can carry complex logic, context, and follow-through across channels, not disconnected tools. AI will move from experimentation to operational infrastructure because it proves financial impact.

Biggest Surprise 2026: The biggest surprise will be that AI can deliver higher client satisfaction and conversion at intake, at scale, in a way that consistently outperforms manual human teams. That performance comes from systems designed upfront to follow firm-specific rules, handle real-world complexity, and enforce compliance.

 

Alexander Irschenberger | CEO, Legal Tekno; External Lecturer in AI and Legal, Queen Mary, University of London

2026 Prediction: In-house legal will surpass law firms in AI usage by a wide margin. Law firms were quick but don't know their ROI whereas in-house teams are a cost center for most businesses – this drives a much stronger incentive.

Biggest Surprise 2026: One of the big incumbents (ThomsonReuters, LexisNexis, etc.) will be the target of a bid to take them over by OpenAI, Anthropic, Harvey, Legora or another blazing Legal Tech tool to purchase their knowledge and build foundational models on it.

 

John Browning | Professor of Law, Faulkner University Thomas Goode Jones School of Law

2026 Prediction: We will continue to see the continued regulations of AI by individual states across a wide variety of subjects, including consumer protection and data privacy, despite federal and executive attempts to preempt such regulations. We will also begin to see heightened efforts to regulate the use of “ AI companions” and the use of AI-powered chatbots for mental health purposes. In addition, there will be a continued trend of suing AI developers for harms caused by their “ products,” and more courts will be receptive to scrutinizing AI within the context of a product liability framework in order to hold companies liable for the way their AI tools have been (supposedly) defectively designed.

Biggest Surprise 2026: We will see significant progress in judicial use/adoption of legal AI tools. We will also see greater adoption by court systems themselves, and we will see new Federal Rules of Evidence adopted to address evidence that has been generated by AI.

 

Dr. Lance Eliot | AI & Law, Forbes Columnist

2026 Prediction: The legal marketplace will continue to slowly adopt AI-based LegalTech. The biggest advancement will be the infusion of multi-modal capabilities. Meanwhile, research on truly useful AI-based legal reasoning (AILR) will finally make solid progress. But, it won't be until 2027 that AILR starts to move out of the lab and into law office practices and the hands of working lawyers.

Biggest Surprise 2026: The biggest surprise will be that lawyers keep making the mistake of trusting AI and get themselves into a pickle about faked citations due to AI hallucinations. The reason this is a surprise is that many seem to believe that legal professionals finally realize the AI isn't to be trusted, but that's only a small portion of lawyers and the rest are going to find out the hard way via the school of hard knocks.

 

Horace Wu | CEO, Syntheia

2026 Prediction: Law firms will sharpen how they select and deploy AI solutions in 2026, with many more focused solutions that are specialized to practice areas. "Agents" and "agentic AI" will be mentioned less and less, because they will become par for the course. Folks will finally swing back to looking at the problems first (rather than the solution first). Many law firms will disappear through M&A activities in late 2026.

Biggest Surprise 2026: Not a surprise: OpenAI and Anthropic will directly compete in the legal vertical. Surprise: subscription products from law firms will gain more traction than expected.

 

Kara Peterson | Co-Founder & CEO, Descrybe

2026 Prediction: By the end of 2026, legal AI will move beyond model-driven differentiation and toward systems defined by the quality and structure of the legal data underneath them. As general-purpose models converge, the real advances will come from platforms built on deeply structured primary law that can support issue identification, authority weighting, and verifiable reasoning. Legal AI will increasingly function less as an assistive layer and more as a reasoning system that reflects how law actually operates in practice. Adoption will favor tools that deliver this depth through workflows designed for real legal work, not prompt engineering.

Biggest Surprise 2026: The biggest surprise will be how quickly the industry realizes that access to law is no longer the differentiator—structure is. Systems grounded in deeply structured legal data will outperform retrieval-based approaches in ways that feel qualitative, not incremental.

 

Mark Williams | Co-Director, Vanderbilt AI Law Lab (VAILL)

2026 Prediction: The rise of agents will continue. They are often sloppy now but getting more powerful. Coding agents, in particular, are getting more accessible for non-technical people to use. And while the gap between prototype and deployment is still wide, it's certainly narrowing, and that could have consequences for the legal tech ecosystem, especially if you do not have a moat around data. AI policy will hit the mainstream as mid-terms approach, with federal preemption, data centers, and other issues becoming political flashpoints in ways we haven't seen before. The market is running hot and a correction somewhere along the AI stack feels inevitable—expect 2026 to more clearly separate winners from losers.

Biggest Surprise 2026: I don't think the average person has grasped how powerful coding agents have become—they unlock an entirely new way of working with computers. It will be startling to see what non-technical people can build at a pace that was unimaginable even a year ago.

 

Jonathan Askin | Professor of Clinical Law, Brooklyn Law School

2026 Prediction: As a clinical law professor actively trying to integrate AI into student practice, I expect law schools to move past abstract debates about whether AI should be used and towards clearly defining when it’s appropriate, how it should be used, and what level of supervision should be required, with those expectations formalized in clinic manuals, honor codes, and assessment criteria. AI will be taught less as a stand-alone research tool and more as a means of reinforcing professional judgment, with explicit instruction on verification, bias recognition, and client disclosure. Law students will be expected to demonstrate responsible AI competence – not merely the ability to generate outputs, but the judgment to limit, override, and decline AI use when appropriate. Successful schools and courses will train the next generation of lawyers to define the problem, supervise and validate AI outputs, integrate them into real-world legal consequences, and own the risk when machines fall short.

Biggest Surprise 2026: In the law school context, I think we’ll be surprised by how quickly law schools will come to recognize and to treat AI as a core lawyering competency, evaluating students on their ability to supervise, verify, and exercise judgment over AI-generated work rather than avoiding its use altogether. Law firms will actively seek those law students who have demonstrated facility and promise in embracing AI as a lawyer-support tool.

 

Haider Ala Hamoudi | Dean and Nippert Professor of Law, University of Cincinnati College of Law

2026 Prediction: From the standpoint of legal education, AI is becoming an increasingly central feature of how law is taught. As students grow more engaged with AI and law schools become more adept at teaching its responsible and effective use, AI will move from the margins to the core of modern legal training. At the same time, the lawyer’s role as counselor remains vital. Connecting with clients, understanding their objectives, exercising judgment, and advising on the best course of action in light of legal, ethical, and human considerations remain fundamentally human tasks. AI can inform that work, but it cannot substitute for it. The challenge for legal education is therefore not simply teaching AI tools, but teaching judgment, ethics, and client-centered lawyering alongside them. In that respect, AI closely resembles the rise of computer-based legal research before it. AI will not replace lawyers. Lawyers who can properly and effectively use AI will replace those who cannot.

Biggest Surprise 2026: The biggest surprise in legal AI in 2026 may be how fragmented and unsettled the regulatory landscape remains. A patchwork of federal and state statutes, regulations, and executive actions is likely to persist, creating uncertainty that hampers the development of coherent national and international policy.

 

Katri Nousiainen | Professor of Economics and Legal Studies, Seton Hall University; Teaching Faculty, Harvard University; Affiliated Fellow, Yale Law School, ISP

2026 Prediction: Regarding predictions for legal AI in 2026, I anticipate a significantly stronger stance on regulatory enforcement. We have already observed increased scrutiny within the US and the EU, and I expect this trend to accelerate. In the near term, the focus will likely remain heavily influenced by the political landscape.

Biggest Surprise 2026: We may see the first major "agentic liability" crisis, where an autonomous AI agent takes a binding legal action (like filing a motion or accepting a settlement) without human approval, forcing a panic over malpractice coverage.

 

Mathew Keshav Lewis | Chief Revenue Officer and U.S. GM at Darrow

2026 Prediction: By the end of 2026, litigation intelligence shifts from episodic research to continuous, predictive decision infrastructure that informs whether to file, where to file, how to litigate, when to settle AND for how much — in near real time. AI will be used as a probabilistic litigation forecasting tool, embedded into both daily and strategic long-term decisions. Use cases will expand far beyond research regarding precedents that support your claim, and rather orient around structured litigation procedural and outcome data that can help efficiently steer not only one case, but an entire firm’s litigation portfolio.

Biggest Surprise 2026: We are entering the era of embedded legal intelligence, where AI is no longer a tool you "use" but an invisible infrastructure integrated into business workflows, litigation triggers, and external-facing systems. Instead of reactive legal work (done on standalone GPTs), legal teams will implement early-warning systems across the organization, to maximize compliance and allow its D&Os and employees to receive legal-risk analysis in business-native language. Decision infrastructure, not research.

 

Alon Shwartz | COO and Co-Founder, Trellis Law

2026 Prediction: By the end of 2026, Generative AI will be broadly embedded across law firms and in-house legal teams, to the point where its use is assumed rather than questioned. As familiarity grows, fear around AI will continue to fade, and attention will shift from experimentation to everyday use. Firms will increasingly use foundational models with the same freedom they use tools like Google or Office today, alongside legal-specific AI tools. This will shape how legal teams view AI as a core part of their work, not a separate or experimental technology.

Biggest Surprise 2026: The biggest surprise in 2026 will be that judges themselves begin using AI more in their own workflows. As a result, courts become less reactive to the idea of AI use and more focused on substance: accuracy, sourcing, and fidelity to the record. Poorly supported arguments will still be penalized, but responsible AI use will feel less controversial.

 

Jess Miers | Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Akron School of Law

2026 Prediction: Generative AI will continue to face intensified regulatory scrutiny aimed at controlling expressive outputs, increasingly justified through child-safety narratives that function as a vehicle for broader content regulation. That scrutiny will be sharply politicized at both the federal and state levels, with lawmakers across the ideological spectrum pressing for regimes that align AI outputs with their respective normative and political preferences. At the same time, chatbot-related litigation will surge in the absence of clear immunities or procedural safeguards. These pressures will accelerate market consolidation. The Generative-AI bubble will eventually burst, leaving a small number of well-capitalized incumbents capable of absorbing regulatory compliance and litigation risk.

Biggest Surprise 2026: As AI becomes more widely used, it will reveal uncomfortable and surprising truths about human institutions rather than the technology itself. For example, the rise of pro se litigants using AI tools exposes vulnerabilities in the litigation system, inefficiencies in traditional law-firm work, and the urgent need to modernize legal education. Similarly, the growing reliance on chatbots for companionship and emotional processing is exposing long-standing gaps in social support and care that predate AI but have remained largely unaddressed.

Blake Rooney | CIO, Husch Blackwell LLP

2026 Prediction: The legal AI vendor landscape will begin a meaningful consolidation in 2026. The frenzied investment that flooded legal tech since late 2022 produced hundreds of AI startups offering overlapping capabilities—contract analysis, document drafting, legal research—each promising revolutionary efficiency gains. In 2026, market realities will assert themselves. Many early-stage companies will struggle to convert pilots into enterprise agreements as law firms and legal departments grow more sophisticated in their evaluation criteria and less tolerant of tools that don't integrate cleanly into existing workflows. We'll see acquisitions, quiet shutdowns, and a flight to quality as buyers consolidate around a smaller number of proven platforms. The survivors will be those that solved real problems at scale, built genuine moats around their data and user experience, and demonstrated the financial discipline to weather a more discerning market.

Biggest Surprise 2026: The surprise won't be that consolidation happened—it will be how quickly large, well-funded legal AI companies prove vulnerable. Venture capital runway masks weak unit economics only so long. Firms that raised at inflated 2023-2024 valuations will face painful down rounds or fire sales, reminding the market that capital raised is not the same as value created.

 

Marcela Saiani Moyses | Co-Founder & CEO of DD8; Lawyer

2026 Prediction: Specialization over generalization: legal AI will be defined less by generic chat interfaces and more by specialized tools embedded into legal workflows, designed to handle specific legal tasks with greater consistency and efficiency. Evidence, governance, and defensibility: As adoption matures, law firms will demand evidence-based outputs with full traceability, governance controls and clear accountability, making defensibility a core requirement rather than a nice-to-have. Operational ROI, not experimentation: Return on investment will be measured by predictable efficiency gains and the ability to remove operational bottlenecks, rather than by novelty or the breadth of features offered. Less regulation on models, more on use: Regulation will ease around model development and tighten around how legal AI is deployed, governed, and held accountable in real legal operations.

Biggest Surprise 2026: The biggest surprise will be how much friction generic legal AI tools create at scale. As firms move from pilots to daily operations, many will realize that prompt-heavy, one-size-fits-all tools can slow teams down, pushing the market toward more specialized, workflow-driven solution.

 

Lydia Flocchini | CEO & Founder, Scarab Strategies & Motion to Scale

2026 Prediction: By the end of 2026, legal AI companies will decisively shift away from per-seat SaaS pricing toward usage-based models that better reflect how legal work is billed. The next generation of pricing will combine a platform fee with transactional, workflow-level charges tied to documents, matters, or discrete AI actions aligning AI costs with hourly, fixed-fee, and alternative fee arrangements. One of the biggest barriers to AI adoption in law hasn’t been capability, but economic misalignment, as per-seat pricing is fundamentally at odds with AI’s variable, outcome-driven value. This has been the missing puzzle piece in the legal AI narrative: applying an old model to something entirely new. Usage-based pricing will accelerate adoption by enabling clearer ROI measurement, client cost transparency, and sustainable integration of AI into legal workflows.

Biggest Surprise 2026: The biggest surprise will be that pricing—not regulation or technology—becomes the primary driver of AI adoption in law. Once AI costs can be passed through at the matter and workflow level, resistance will drop and adoption will accelerate far faster than most expect.

 

Melissa Jones | Firm Managing Partner, Stoel Rives, LLP

2026 Prediction: I predict that in 2026, law firms will begin to see substantial growth of outside counsel guidelines prohibiting or limiting billing for rote AI-capable tasks. I also predict an increase in client engagement encouraging that firms use AI to enable efficiencies, which will accelerate more broadscale adoption among lawyers and firms.

Biggest Surprise 2026: The biggest surprise may be increased adoption by more experienced lawyers who are better positioned to know when AI is right or wrong and how to use it to achieve better outcomes.

 

Jeremy Bock | Alan and Louise Fisch Professor of Law, Tulane University Law School

2026 Prediction: States will take the lead in regulating AI, regardless of White House directives. More people will realize that LLMs are stochastic parrots.

Biggest Surprise 2026: AI-related dealmaking might decline after reaching its zenith in 2025.

 

Darren Fancher | Co-Founder, Bot Mediation

2026 Prediction: In 2026, legal AI will start to shift from productivity tools to outcome-driven systems. AI won’t only be about drafting faster documents, but about systems that meaningfully change how disputes resolve and deals get done. Adoption will accelerate through trusted hybrid models that combine human judgment with AI-driven processes. We’ll see AI move earlier into the lifecycle of cases, helping parties assess risk and resolve matters before litigation hardens positions.

Biggest Surprise 2026: Legal AI’s biggest surprise will be how quickly it shifts from saving time to shaping outcomes. Faster documents will matter less than faster, better resolutions.

 

Cecilia Ziniti | 3x General Counsel & CEO and Founder, GC AI

2026 Prediction: Legal AI deepens its shift from “assistant” to core operating infrastructure for in-house teams. The winners will be vertical systems that reflect legal judgment and auditability rather than generic chat. Procurement standards will increase around accuracy, controls, and record-keeping. The market will separate tools that can stand behind their outputs from those that can’t.

Biggest Surprise 2026: How quickly the debate moves from whether to adopt AI to how much autonomy legal teams should permit in day-to-day work. The speed of that shift will catch regulators, vendors, and law firms off guard.

 

James Tommey | Vice President, Global Head of IT and Chief Information Technology Officer, DISCO

2026 Prediction: Agentic AI will come of age. The industry will pivot from seeing AI as a generative chatbot to autonomous Agents capable of planning and executing multi-step workflows, such as managing an entire eDiscovery process or negotiating a deal with minimal human oversight.

Biggest Surprise 2026: As AI tooling matures, the risk profile will shift: rather than being seen as the source of risk, the clear risk will be not using AI in the practice of law. Firms will rapidly adopt the technology as clients and courts require its use.

 

Richard Crum | Chief Product, Technology, and Strategy Officer, DISCO

2026 Prediction: In 2026, lawyers and courts will stop treating hallucinations as a reason not to use AI and recognize that clinging to manual processes creates far greater risks in cost, accuracy, and defensibility. I also expect legal pros will show a growing preference for unified, end-to-end platforms over various point solutions that disrupt efficiency through siloed data and disjointed experiences. These mindset shifts will carry meaningful ripple effects for how matters are handled.

Biggest Surprise 2026: In complex cases with massive data volumes – where human-only review cannot keep pace – AI-driven collections, review, and production work will move toward being the presumptive best practice in litigation. Anyone still relying on traditional, manual document review will look negligent by comparison.

 

Jenny Schroeder | Solutions Architect, DISCO

2026 Prediction: Operational centralization and process optimization will remain top of mind in 2026. This will involve continued efforts to unify the law practice technology stack, primarily through cloud-based ecosystems that drive efficiency across functions ranging from matter management and litigation to transactional document review. At the same time, firms will need to address the recovery of costs associated with more complex tools and resources, which will deepen pressure on the traditional hourly billing model. As a result, fixed-fee and alternative pricing arrangements are likely to see broader adoption.

Biggest Surprise 2026: In eDiscovery, cloud platforms will further solidify their dominance as on-prem models continue to lose ground. As data sets continue growing to levels that strain traditional systems, the cloud’s ability to securely centralize data across distributed legal teams and scale alongside rising data volumes will elevate these platforms to a new level of strategic importance.

 

Terry Sanks | Managing Partner, Beusse Sanks

2026 Prediction: Federal versus state regulation of AI is one aspect of the AI ecosphere that is going to be prominent in 2026. States are passing and considering laws to regulate AI whereas there are federal efforts, such as President Trump’s December 2025 executive order, aimed at halting state-level AI regulations. While states’ efforts are directed towards addressing such concerns as transparency, bias, consumer protection, algorithmic discrimination, and protecting their citizens’ rights, the resulting effort will create a patchwork of state-level AI regulations that will handicap the development and use of AI across the U.S. Whereas the federal government is focused on global concerns as it seeks to prohibit barriers to keep America competitive with other nations, particularly China, in AI development. 

Biggest Surprise 2026: While all categories of businesses continue to learn how to integrate AI to improve profitability, later in 2026 companies will begin to look at how their suppliers, such as law firms, are utilizing AI to provide service in an effort to realize a price reduction for services provided. Hence, how a provider uses AI to provide services will soon be a regular inquiry in an effort to receive services at a reduced rate.

 

Evan Shenkman | Chief Knowledge & Innovation Officer, Fisher Phillips

2026 Prediction: In 2026 I expect to see a massive spike in (largely AI-facilitated) pro se case filings, leading to a significant increase in overall volume of new case filings, and an even more dramatic increase in average number of motions per case. The judiciary will struggle to keep up (unless and until they embrace AI tools of their own).

 

Darrell Mottley | Assistant Clinical Professor of Law, Suffolk University

2026 Prediction: Legal AI in 2026 will bring more consolidation of AI legal technology firms.

Biggest Surprise 2026: The AI EU Act may overshadow US AI regulatory actions.

 

Paul McGreal | Professor of Law, Creighton University School of Law

2026 Prediction: AI will close the resource gap between professors at elite and non-elite law schools. Professors at elite law schools can rely on armies of research assistants and others to support their teaching and research, while professors at resource poor non-elite law schools struggle to keep their heads above water. AI has the potential to close that gap, unless members of the academy erect barriers to AI use under the pretense of policing the ethics and integrity of the profession

Biggest Surprise 2026: That the advances in AIO capability will plateau as the profession realizes that scaling isn't the path to AGI. That will give the profession time to experiment on the best implementations of AI, just as it took years to figure out how to best integrate PCs.

 

Amelie-Sophie Vavrovsky | CEO, Formally

2026 Prediction: By 2026, AI will be embedded into nearly every legal workflow, becoming the invisible operating layer behind intake, analysis, drafting, communication, and compliance. Lawyers are significantly underestimating how quickly AI will move from an optional tool to a default expectation. At the same time, client expectations will shift: speed and paperwork will be table stakes, while deeply personalized, proactive legal care becomes the true differentiator. The firms that win will use AI not just to automate work, but to deliver more human, contextual, and responsive client experiences at scale.

Biggest Surprise 2026: The biggest surprise will be how fast client expectations—not technology—force adoption across the industry. The second surprise will be that AI’s greatest impact is enabling more personal, not less human, legal services.

 

Kyle Poe | VP of Legal Innovation & Strategy, Legora

2026 Prediction: In 2026, AI will create a new mode of collaboration between in-house teams and their law firms, fundamentally redefining that relationship. Forward-looking firms will move beyond episodic advice to deliver systems that embed their knowledge and experience into reusable, AI-powered workflows that clients rely on in their daily operations. This model allows firms to scale legal judgment rather than time. Firms that adopt it will remain structurally embedded in client decision-making as AI reshapes the market.

Biggest Surprise 2026: The biggest surprise will be how quickly advantage concentrates among lawyers who can translate legal judgment into systems, not just outputs. AI fluency will become a defining requirement of modern legal practice.

 

Jin Yoshikawa | Member (Attorney), Butler Snow’s Drug and Medical Device Litigation Practice Group

2026 Prediction: We will see even more AI-generated content – from pleadings, briefs, discovery, expert reports, emails, and letters – fill court dockets and attorney inboxes, but with fewer obvious hallucinations. Instead, we will see polished papers and better citations to the record and law. The burden and cost of legal services will increase, rather than decrease, because the speed, quality, and volume of legal work will skyrocket. We will see a court opinion about AI slop, the increasing burden on courts due to AI, and the responsibilities of human attorneys beyond merely prompting and checking citations.

Biggest Surprise 2026: Law firms will announce record revenues and record hiring despite AI, as demand for legal services explodes. An amendment to the state or federal rules of civil procedure will be proposed to address the increasing volume of AI filings, much like e-discovery triggered the proportionality requirement in Rule 26 or the plausibility standard for pleadings.

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