Technology budgets at legal departments are predicted to double in the next two years, according to research and analysis by Gartner Inc.
According to the business and technology insights company, specialized legal AI platforms, such as Harvey, Legora, GC AI, and Thomson Reuters CoCounsel, are delivering significant productivity and efficiency gains in important legal workflows, leading companies to significantly increase what they are planning to spend on legal technology in the near future.
“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 organizational context,” said Weston Wicks, senior director analyst in the Gartner Legal & Compliance Practice.
“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,” said Wicks.
Legal AI Platforms combine specialized and general‑purpose AI agents, coordinated through structured workflows, are emerging as a comprehensive solution to address the practical requirements of in‑house legal teams. Some tools can draw on both extensive legal databases and an organization’s proprietary data, which has potential to help general counsel and their teams improve efficiency, manage risk more effectively, and support consistent, well‑informed decision‑making.
“If implemented effectively, multi agent legal applications offer a light at the end of the tunnel for burned out legal teams facing persistent disruption and an ever more complex and dynamic legal, compliance and risk landscape.” said Wicks. “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 analysts have identified six beneficial capabilities often included in legal AI applications for legal departments.
- Accelerated legal research through natural‑language queries, with higher reliability when applications integrate directly with primary research databases
- Faster case preparation and litigation support by automating document analysis, reducing administrative workload, and enabling earlier, data‑driven case assessments
- Automated contract review and redlining that applies playbooks, flags risks, and proposes edits, while keeping lawyers in full control of acceptance
- Comprehensive contract analysis and metadata extraction that identifies nonstandard terms, liabilities, and key dates to support real‑time portfolio visibility
- Significantly accelerated M&A due diligence by rapidly categorizing and assessing large volumes of contracts and filings, compressing review timelines from weeks to days
- End‑to‑end agentic workflow orchestration that automates multistep legal processes from intake through analysis and drafting, reducing manual handoffs and administrative friction
“By 2029, approximately 50 percent of contract reviews will be delegated to self-service systems that escalate only one in 10 for human review,” said Wicks. “In the same timeframe, we predict that 60 percent of legal departments will use AI-driven intake systems that capture all requests and answer one-half of those without human intervention.” 