Introduction
In 2025, AI was one of the biggest legaltech trends to watch. Legal teams expanded real world AI usage beyond pilots and novelty demos. It was also the year regulatory pressure got louder and more specific, with examples like the DORA regulation and other AI related rules emerging across markets. The message from regulators and boards was basically this: if AI is inside your legal workflows, you need governance that can stand up to scrutiny.
In 2026, legaltech shifts from experimentation to execution. The winners will not be the teams that adopted the most AI features. The winners will be the teams that built the strongest foundation for reliable automation, defensible decision making, and scalable compliance.
Here are four trends legal teams should watch closely in 2026.
1. AI agents
In recent years, AI has formally entered the legal world. For the most part, this has meant legal teams implementing tools that respond to specific and mostly routine tasks. Generative AI has been the star of the show: drafting clauses, summarizing documents, extracting key terms, and answering questions. All of these are useful implementations of AI. They help teams reduce tedious work and automate parts of legal processes. So where is the but? They still require human oversight, and regularly.
AI agents are expected to become the next practical operating model shift. The main difference from how AI is used in legal today is that agents are goal driven systems that can plan and complete tasks, rather than only generate outputs. Gartner expects a major increase in enterprise software embedding agentic AI by 2028.
For legal teams, this means less time spent on repetitive orchestration and more time spent on oversight. Intake can be routed automatically. Contract workflows can move forward with fewer manual nudges. Compliance checks can run continuously, with exceptions escalated for review.
The obvious risk is that autonomous action increases the chance of errors being executed at scale. That is why organized legal data and strong legal intelligence are crucial, and why they are also part of this year’s legaltech trends.
2. Data readiness and intelligence
If AI could create intelligence and clean, organize, and structure data on its own, that would be great. The truth is AI still needs human input to work. It needs our intelligence, our data, and our structure. Whether your legal intelligence is updated and clean or not, AI powered workflows will use that information, and the outcomes will depend on it. This advanced technology scales whatever you already have, good or bad.
2025 was a year of testing and trying, with more AI workflows, prompts, and automations being added to the legal workload. What legal teams can expect in 2026 is less talk about features and more talk about readiness. Legal professionals should be asking:
Automation can only be trusted when legal data and legal intelligence are solid. Gartner has explicitly called out poor data quality as a frequently mentioned barrier to deploying advanced analytics such as AI. As DiliTrust Head of Legal Intelligence and Alliances, Rupali Patel Shah, mentioned in a previous piece, “Businesses do not run on data. They run on intelligence.“
3. Predictive governance
Times when legal teams worked reactively rather than proactively are long gone. Reactive compliance is expensive, and in a world where regulations can change from one day to the next, it is risky. Legal teams have been adopting tools to move away from acting as an emergency response unit, and we will see this formalize even further in 2026.
We are entering the era of predictive governance, where teams prepare ahead of time to gain a strategic advantage over compliance and regulatory shifts. This includes horizon scanning, mapping requirements to internal controls before deadlines, and stress testing policies against likely regulatory directions. Predictive governance goes a step further than maintaining compliance because it helps teams plan for what is coming. In this context, the use of AI will be significant, but again, data and intelligence are at the core of reaching a truly efficient level of predictive governance.
Predictive governance is also expected to support legal teams in becoming growth enablers. When the business can move into new markets, new products, or new partnerships with fewer last minute compliance surprises, that is the outcome teams can expect.
4. Cybersecurity
Cybersecurity has always been a core concern for legal teams, but AI has changed the game. Risk does not stop at data breaches. With AI powered workflows, automations, and in the future AI agents, the risks also include where information goes, who can access it, and what is being shared. Legal work usually involves sensitive information, and third party tools can increase risk exposure. In a way, the more legal teams use AI, the more they need to think like risk architects, not just data reviewers.
None of these points can work without trust in the information and the AI systems used at work. Predictive governance and data intelligence both depend on trust at different levels: trust in your information, trust in your processes, trust in your AI enabled workflows, and trust in how secure they are. For instance, if cybersecurity is weak, predictive governance becomes reactive overnight, because a breach or an AI misuse incident can instantly turn into a legal and compliance emergency.
A year that will go beyond tech and features
Legaltech in 2026 will not be only centered around the latest AI functionality and more features., but around building the best conditions to work with new tech while avoiding chaos.
AI agents, predictive governance, cybersecurity in the age of AI, and data readiness all point to the same outcome: the most effective legal teams will lead with intelligence, not noise.
Meet Legal AI – Lini
Lini is the AI engine that powers every dimension of legal work. Trained to think like a legal expert, Lini understands the nuances of governance, compliance, risk and reasons with context, not assumptions.
