Legal and compliance teams are entering one of the most technology-driven years the profession has ever seen. AI, automation and new regulatory pressures are converging, creating a landscape where speed, accuracy and strategic insight determine which organisations stay ahead.
According to the Thomson Reuters Future Of Professionals report, most experts already expect AI to transform their work within five years, with many viewing it as a positive force. The challenge now is clear: legal and compliance leaders must understand the tools reshaping their field and prepare their teams for a very different way of working in 2026.
Here are the trends that will matter most.
1. AI Agents As Legal Assistants
AI agents are a huge step forward from previous generations of information assistants like search engines and chatbots. This is because they can take action and work towards goals autonomously, instead of just answering questions and generating content. The implications of this are huge, as after delegating all the repetitive, manual work, human workers will have much more time for the more important tasks, often requiring interpersonal skills computers can’t match, that generate real value.
2. AI As A Driver Of Business Strategy
The ability of AI to forecast risk, model the impact of regulatory changes, analyze markets and identify opportunities for efficiency is becoming central to business decision-making. Rather than simply delegating routine work, forward-looking professionals are increasingly looking towards new technology to drive innovation and deliver new business models. This could include offering subscription-based AI services to clients and new data-driven products.
3. Automation In Judicial Administration
Courts frequently suffer from long backlogs and shortages of trained human staff, a global problem that often delays the administration of justice. To tackle this, we can expect to see increasing use of AI and automation technology deployed as an administrative tool, assisting with scheduling, creating personalized summaries and procedural documents for judiciaries and court staff, as well as anticipating and predicting bottlenecks and delays.
4. Always-On Compliance Monitoring
Regulatory intelligence platforms perform tasks involving monitoring for regulatory and legislative changes, providing live tracking and updates, and sometimes even automatically generating and filing reports to maintain compliance. This fast-growing field of regtech helps legal teams avoid falling foul of regulatory risks by flagging incoming requirements and tracking law changes across relevant jurisdictions. By making responding to regulatory change a managed, automated process, legal professionals will be better positioned to avoid unexpected surprises.
5. Cybersecurity As An Essential Survival Tool
Law firms, with their huge troves of client data, represent prime targets for cyber criminals. This is demonstrated by stats telling us that over 40 percent of US firms experienced security breaches last year. This means that in 2026, security can no longer be solely on the agenda of the IT department. Firms that fail to implement robust defenses, safeguard confidentiality and build organization-wide security-first cultures risk huge penalties and, even more damagingly, loss of client trust.
6. Predictive Litigation
Until now, AI use cases in law firms have centered around automation of repetitive workflows such as research and summarizing. This is likely to change as more sophisticated models open the door to probabilistic use cases such as predicting the outcome of litigation and assessing risk. The ability to more accurately estimate potential costs and rewards will mean law firms can set prices and manage cases more efficiently, as well as make better educated decisions about when to fight and when to settle.
7. Compliance As Part Of The Everyday Automation Fabric
Today, software for carrying out everything from marketing automation to HR to AI-powered accounts reconciliation comes with compliance functionality “bolted on”. Although this will remove some manual and repetitive work from the schedule of legal and compliance professionals, there will still be a need to provide oversight, where employees who are not legal specialists could otherwise be handling sign-offs. I expect auditing the operation of compliance processes in end-to-end, non-specialist tools and platforms to form a growing part of the workload of legal and compliance professionals in 2026.
As these technologies mature, the legal and compliance landscape will continue to shift from reactive oversight to proactive, intelligence-driven strategy. The firms and professionals who thrive in 2026 will be those who embrace these tools early, build the skills to use them well and position themselves as trusted partners in an increasingly complex business environment.
