NetDocuments Report: Six Legal Tech Trends Shaping 2026

NetDocuments, an enterprise content management in the cloud, has published its 2026 Legal Tech Trends report. Informed by legal professionals, technology partners including Microsoft and Thomson Reuters, plus NetDocuments’ own experts, the report identifies six key trends for the year ahead.
 
The report provides insight for legal professionals navigating rapid change, not only in what AI can do, but also in how it should be applied, governed, and adopted. At this time, NetDocuments says, technology is becoming more than a tool: transitioning into a partner that gives time, clarity, and purpose back to the people driving the future of the legal profession. The report predicts the following trends will emerge across 2026:

1. The Rise of the Intelligent Assistant: Legal professionals aren’t just passively using AI: they’re actively collaborating with it. Proactive, context-aware assistants with purpose-built tools are moving work from reactive to strategic, surfacing insights, connecting ideas, and removing the drudgery and cognitive burden of everyday tasks.
2. Automation with Intent: Workflows are starting to plan before they act, adapting and responding to nuance, helping teams shift from babysitting processes to orchestrating outcomes. The most powerful AI is the kind lawyers never have to think about, quietly working for them in the background.
3. Collaboration Without Boundaries: With cross-platform co-authoring, teams are spending less time tracking versions and more time creating value through collaboration.
4. Search Becomes Understanding: AI-enabled semantic search at scale is delivering results, not lists, interpreting meaning, context, and intent. One natural-language query replaces hours of manual digging.
   
5. The Era of Connected Intelligence: In 2026, integrations will mature into something deeper: a secure, intelligent nervous system. AI tools and other apps no longer coexist – they coordinate.
6. Knowledge That Organises Itself: AI profiling and metadata enrichment can automatically convert unstructured content into structured insights. That means no more inconsistent or incomplete tagging, and no more manual hours spent on organisation.

Josh Baxter, CEO of NetDocuments, says: “This year’s trends report arrives at an important moment for our industry. The rapid rise of AI has pushed legal teams across law firms, corporate legal departments, and government agencies to rethink how work gets done: not only what AI can do, but how it should be applied, governed and adopted. Amid that change, one principle has guided our decisions at NetDocuments: the DMS must now function as the strategic core of modern legal operations.
 
“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. That shift is well underway, and we are investing heavily to ensure the NetDocuments platform provides the intelligence, extensibility, and governance that legal teams require.”
 
The full report is available to download.