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The rapid rise of legal AI is set to force a major rethink across the industry’s budgets, with Gartner forecasting that legal tech spending will double within just three years.
Global research and advisory firm Gartner has forecast a sharp surge in legal tech investment, with budgets expected to hit record highs and ultimately double by 2028.
This rapid escalation in spending is being driven by legal teams racing to adopt artificial intelligence and next-generation tools, fuelled not only by a push for innovation but also by growing pressure to avoid being left behind in a historic transformation of the legal profession.
Positioning specialised legal AI platforms as delivering “significant productivity and efficiency gains”, Gartner noted they are increasingly emerging as a comprehensive, end-to-end solution designed to meet the day-to-day operational demands of in-house legal teams.
Weston Wicks, senior director analyst in the Gartner legal and compliance practice, highlighted the growing impact of legal tech on productivity and the streamlining of complex workflows across legal teams, pointing to this shift as a key driver behind the surge in demand and the projected spike in legal tech spending over the next three years.
“Early evidence suggests multi-agent legal applications offer gains in productivity, reduced reliance on external counsel, and improvements in compliance, though outcomes will vary depending on implementation and organisational context,” Wicks said.
“These applications are designed to accelerate routine workflows, extract key insights, and help to orchestrate complex legal processes, freeing up lawyers’ time to focus on providing strategic advice, risk management, and high-value client service.”
When implemented effectively, Wicks also noted that legal tech could offer meaningful relief to legal teams under mounting regulatory and workload pressure, with its rapid growth already evident in rising investment and a fast-expanding range of tools entering the market.
“If implemented effectively, multi-agent legal applications offer a light at the end of the tunnel for burnt-out legal teams facing persistent disruption and an ever more complex and dynamic legal, compliance, and risk landscape,” Wicks said.
“The rapid growth of multi-agent legal applications is evident in both rising investment and the increasing number of available tools in the market.”
Gartner identified “six beneficial capabilities” where legal AI platforms are already delivering measurable value, ranging from faster legal research, automated contract review and analysis, and streamlined case preparation driven by document automation and data-led insights.
Looking further ahead, Wicks predicted that by 2029, AI will handle around half of all contract review tasks, with only a small proportion escalating to lawyers for final review.
“By 2029, approximately 50 per cent of contract reviews will be delegated to self-service systems that escalate only one in 10 for human review,” Wicks said.
On top of that, he also expects more than half of legal departments to adopt AI-driven intake systems capable of automatically resolving a significant share of incoming legal requests without human intervention.
“In the same time frame, we predict that 60 per cent of legal departments will use AI-driven intake systems that capture all requests and answer one-half of those without human intervention,” Wicks said.
