Two Ideas You Can Adopt Now for Your 2026 Legal Tech Strategy

1. Run a 90 Day Work Pilot (Not a Firm-Wide Overhaul)

Small and medium sized law firms can’t out innovate big law firms, but they can out-move them.

Even the most forward-thinking law firms fail when they innovate at scale. Their tech rollout collapses because nobody knows how to fit the technology into the legal work. With undefined roles, training becomes inconsistent and burdensome until the technology inevitably gets abandoned.

In 2026, the competitive advantage comes from small, high-impact pilots that show measurable results:

A small litigation boutique ran a small 90-day pilot, using AI to regenerate first-pass drafts of motions to compel. AI handled the initial instruction and issue spotting while attorneys reviewed and revised the drafts. The result? The firm cut drafting time by more than a third and expanded their workflow into discovery motions.

Clients don’t want cheaper. They want faster and better.

2. Build a Cross-Functional Legal + Tech Operating Team

Instead of having separate departments (attorneys, IT, KM, paralegals, operations) all working independently, winning firms form small, interdisciplinary teams to regularly meet and design HOW the legal work is done.

A cross functional team can destroy bottlenecks in real time, so attorneys can spend more time on high-level strategy and less time on administrative drag.

 You can see the difference immediately:

• Paralegal: “The problem is duplicative tagging—everyone is redoing work.”
• KM: “We actually have 20 tagged corpuses nobody touches.”
• Attorney: “We need a redline that recognizes the clause variables.”
• IT: “We can tune the model using your actual templates.”
• Operations: “40% time reduction improves margins even under the billable model.”

Together, this team redesigns the workflow, tests it for two months, and rolls it out with training built by the same pod.

This is a stark contrast to the old model where IT buys tools in a vacuum and lawyers ignore them, staff are uncommitted to workflows they did not help create, and workflows never change.

Already building or preparing for the upcoming legal tech wave? We’re here to help showcase you as a thought leader.