The Legal AI Bill Nobody Can Forecast Yet

DISCO (NYSE: LAW), a creator of industry-leading litigation technology, announced the findings of its annual study of legal AI trends in law firms and corporate legal departments, conducted by Ari Kaplan Advisors. The research finds that legal teams have largely settled the question of AI’s capabilities and have moved on to a harder one: what it costs, and whether anyone can predict that number in advance.

In DISCO’s 2025 study, cost savings were a headline expectation, with 32 per cent of participants already realising savings from AI and 55 per cent expecting them. In the 2026 research, participants raised a different subject without being asked: the shift in legal AI pricing away from annual subscriptions towards consumption-based token and credit models, and the difficulty of budgeting against it. ‘The token/credit costs seem to be changing as the definition of a task evolves; there seems to be a lack of visibility into what constitutes a task and how credit usage is calculated,’ said one law firm participant.

Legal departments described building operational machinery around the problem to increase cost certainty. One reported billing token costs back to individual business units. Another is assigning each lawyer a personal token allocation and was candid about the risk, noting that ‘this could result in much higher long-term costs since most people do not monitor their usage.’ A law firm participant framed it as a planning problem: ‘budgeting will become an even bigger challenge because it will be harder to identify what a tool should be used for, how much it costs and the best way to budget for it.’

‘The legal industry has resolved the AI capability question much faster than it has resolved the economics question. Legal teams understand what AI can do but have little visibility into what it will cost them to do it. Pricing transparency has become a bigger constraint on adoption than output, and law firms and corporations are increasingly demanding better line of sight to return on investment and the bottom line,’ said DISCO’s Director of AI Consulting, James Park.

Download the full survey results and white paper.

Methodology
In the summer of 2026, Ari Kaplan Advisors conducted an online survey completed by 104 individuals, supplemented by 33 in-depth interviews. Fifty-three respondents (51 per cent) work in law firms and 51 (49 per cent) in corporate legal departments. Sixty-eight per cent work in organisations with more than 1,000 employees, and 91 per cent of law firm participants handle commercial litigation, among other practice areas. Findings reported separately for law firms or corporate legal departments are based on approximately 51 to 53 responses. The prior-year study, conducted from 8 August to 29 September 2025, surveyed 112 individuals and interviewed 32 leaders, divided evenly between law firms and corporate legal departments.

About DISCO
DISCO (NYSE: LAW) provides comprehensive, innovative solutions for modern litigation. They create and service an intuitive, cloud-native platform at the forefront of litigation technology, backed by expert professional services and support.

About Ari Kaplan Advisors
Ari Kaplan Advisors is a leading legal industry advisory company that publishes benchmarking reports on legal technology trends, delivers networking, public speaking and business development training for law firms and other professional services providers, and offers personal coaching and access to its proprietary coaching software platform, https://www.lawcountability.com.