Legal Ops and Legal Tech: A 2024 Review and 2025 Forecast

BrightFlag’s Kevin Cohn’s predictions for the 2024 legal operations and legal tech landscape resulted in a mix of hits, misses, and uncertainties. While some expectations materialized as anticipated, others fell short or remained inconclusive. 

One of the major hits in 2024 was the increase in hiring for legal operations, even though many of these positions were more junior than expected. Compensation normalization within legal ops was a miss, contradicting initial predictions. In contrast, the growing reliance on AI in legal functions was confirmed, with a Deloitte survey indicating that the vast majority of chief legal officers are incorporating generative AI into their operations. 

CFOs continue to take the lead and are focusing on responsible growth, making it essential for legal ops to present strong business cases for legal tech investments. Environmental, social, and governance, until recently a fast-growing area, was a miss and dropped into the third rail of corporate governance. 

Looking ahead to 2025, legal ops and legal tech are poised for significant evolution, driven by advancements in AI, shifts in software adoption, and changing industry dynamics. Purpose-built AI tools will gain prominence as they outperform general-purpose AI in specialized tasks such as workflow automation. The importance of prompt engineering will grow, and AI assistants will become more prevalent. Meanwhile, AI regulation is expected to remain limited, with the EU Artificial Intelligence Act serving as the primary safeguard.

Instead of traditionally separate organizations for chief legal officers and legal operations professionals, there will be more collaboration at industry events, and legal tech buyers will increasingly rely on expert networks to discover and evaluate solutions. Customer service as a key differentiator for vendors, the growing influence of community-driven insights, and continued consolidation in contract lifecycle management will signal further transformation in the legal tech space.