Cloud platform NetDocuments has outlined six legal tech trends for 2026 in its “2026 Legal Tech Trends” report.
The expected key trends are the rise of intelligent assistants powered by purpose-built tools, intentional automation, unbounded collaboration through cross-platform coauthoring, artificial intelligence-enabled semantic searches, collaborative AI tools and apps, and self-organizing knowledge through AI profiling and metadata enrichment.
The report indicated that this year would see a shift from using reactive tools to adopting proactive intelligence like background AI, smart answers, and agentic AI. Moreover, it anticipated that agentic AI and automated intelligence would drive the development of workflows that could understand intent and interpret patterns in matters, cases, investigations, and departmental operations.
Microsoft 365 integrations facilitate collaboration among internal stakeholders, external counsel, agencies and multi-department teams on applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. AI-driven searches analyze natural language for meaning and context to yield accurate results quickly, complemented by systems that processes, classifies, and links documents to identify matter details, clauses, tasks, issues, parties, PII, work product and relationships across the repository. This organization supports litigation, transactions, compliance, investigations, and public-sector work.
Moreover, the emergence of connected intelligence suggests that Microsoft 365 can coordinate with AI assistants, legal research tools, and internal apps.
“For years, document management focused on storing and organising information. Today, it must do much more. It must activate your knowledge, support intelligent workflows and serve as the secure environment where AI can work reliably and responsibly,” NetDocuments CEO Josh Baxter said in the report.
He added that document management systems “must now function as the strategic core of modern legal operations.” The report also noted that organizations needed to complement innovation with intentional change management, strategies, and adoption to reap the benefits of emerging trends.
NetDocuments obtained input from legal professionals and technology partners Microsoft and Thomson Reuters for the “2026 Legal Tech Trends” report.