Where Legal Is Heading: 9 Trends from Global Legal Forum 2026

We just spent two days at the Global Legal Forum in The Hague. The sessions covered AI, legal ops, compliance culture, contract management, and the evolving relationship between in-house and external counsel.

But the sessions are one thing. What stays with you after is different. The patterns that kept appearing across unrelated panels. The things multiple speakers said independently without knowing the others were saying the same thing.

Here is what we took away. Not a summary of the event, but our read on where the legal industry is going based on what we heard, who we talked to, and what we have been seeing in our own conversations with general counsel.

1. The Real Lever Is What Comes Before the Tools.

This was the single loudest message of the forum. It came up in nearly every session, from nearly every speaker, and often from the audience too.

Manuel Mesquita from MM Legal put it most clearly. He laid out four pillars of a legal operating system: operating model, process and standards, data and knowledge, and technology. AI sits in the fourth pillar. It only works if the first three are in place.

The implication is straightforward. If your templates are inconsistent, AI will produce inconsistent outputs. If your intake process is chaotic, automating it just creates faster chaos. If knowledge lives on individual laptops instead of in shared systems, no tool can surface it reliably.

Shruti Ajitsaria from A&O Shearman opened the forum with a question that captured this perfectly: where is the productivity gain if we use these tools all day but do not actually get more done? The tools are there. People are using them. But the output is not necessarily increasing.

This is not a new idea. But it felt more urgent this year. The gap between what AI can do and what legal teams are ready for is widening, not narrowing. The teams that invest in process foundations now will be the ones that actually benefit from AI in 18 months.

2. Legal Teams Cannot Navigate This Alone

Here is what nobody at the forum said out loud, but everyone in the room was feeling: the number of options is paralyzing. General purpose AI tools, legal-specific AI tools, CLM platforms, compliance platforms, workflow automation, legal analytics. The landscape is enormous. And it is moving fast.

At Bind, we have spoken with roughly 100 general counsel in recent months, and this keeps coming up. Most teams have tried something. The experience has been underwhelming. Not because the tools are bad, but because nobody helped them figure out what they actually needed first.

Manuel Mesquita runs a transformation consultancy that helps legal teams through exactly this. (His full session recap is here.) His message was clear: digital transformation is above all a mindset transformation. You cannot copy-paste what worked in another organization. You need someone who understands your starting point, your risk appetite, your people, and your budget.

Iris Steyer from Alpitronic drove this home from a different angle. She has walked into multiple organizations that had no legal function at all and built everything from scratch. Her first challenge is always the same: justifying why legal exists before she can change anything. The business case has to come first. The tool comes later.

3. In-House and Law Firms Need Completely Different Technology

One of the clearest themes was how different the AI and technology needs are between in-house legal teams and law firms. They are fundamentally different buyers with fundamentally different needs.

Law firms need tools that make individual lawyers faster. Research, drafting, document review. The value proposition is throughput: more billable work per hour, or the same work in fewer hours. Tools like Harvey and Legora are built for this.

In-house legal teams need something different entirely. They are not trying to bill more hours. They are trying to remove bottlenecks so the business can move faster. The right tool for in-house is one that lets routine work flow without legal involvement at all: self-service for the business, guardrails that work automatically, and legal stepping in only for exceptions.

For in-house teams, the question is not "which AI tool should we use?" It is "how do we stop being a bottleneck?" That is a fundamentally different starting point, and it leads to fundamentally different technology decisions. A tool that makes a law firm associate 30% faster at drafting does nothing for a general counsel who needs 200 NDAs to flow without touching her desk.

4. The Technology Is Ready. Changing Processes Is the Hard Part.

The technology for contract automation, AI-assisted review, compliance workflows, and legal analytics is broadly available. Good technology. The capability is there. But getting organizations to actually change how they work is a different challenge entirely.

Claudio Elia from STMicroelectronics told a story at the forum about building a perfect automation. It worked exactly as designed. Nobody used it. Kerry Westland's response: it comes down to rewards, incentives, and culture. Claudio also brought up that legal teams need legal designers, people who can bridge the gap between legal expertise and new technology.

This pattern repeated in different forms throughout the two days. The bottleneck is not innovation. It is adoption. And adoption is a human and organizational challenge, not a technology one. There is now a clear need for people who specialize in redesigning legal processes, legal designers who understand both the legal work and the technological possibilities. The technology has arrived. The people who can reshape workflows around it are what is missing.

When 58% of legal professionals are learning about AI on their own, without structure or guidance, that tells you something. Organizations are deploying tools without investing in the process redesign and change management that makes them stick.

The teams that succeed will be the ones that treat process transformation as a first-class workstream. Legal designers, change management, training, incentives, feedback loops. Not just a rollout email and a Confluence page. The technological possibility is here. Reshaping the processes around it is the real work.

5. Self-Service Is the Path to 10x

The conversation about efficiency kept splitting into two very different ambitions. One group was focused on making lawyers faster. Better tools, quicker drafting, faster review. The other group was asking a bigger question: what if the business could handle routine legal work without involving legal at all?

Dr. Thomas Barothy put it directly: no repetitive work should be done by legal professionals if it can be avoided. Kerry Westland pushed the same idea from a different angle. How much routine work can you push to the business so they handle it themselves? More than most teams think, she argued, but it requires building the right guardrails.

The shift is not just operational. It is philosophical. It means legal teams accepting that not everything needs their direct involvement. It means trusting the business to handle standard matters within guardrails that legal has set up.

That is where agentic AI starts to matter. Not as a tool that helps lawyers draft faster, but as infrastructure that lets the business self-serve with legal guardrails built in. The 2x gain comes from better tools. The 10x gain comes from removing legal from routine workflows entirely.

6. Agentic AI Is the Current Frontier

The AI conversation at the forum was more nuanced than at most events. Speakers distinguished clearly between general purpose AI (ChatGPT, Copilot), legal-specific AI tools (Harvey, Legora, Spellbook), and true AI agents.

Not all agents are the same. There are automated pipelines (fixed workflows that are not really agentic), autonomous agents (powerful but hard to trust for legal work), and collaborative agents that work alongside legal teams with visibility and control.

The distinction matters because it shapes how legal teams should evaluate tools. A chatbot that answers questions is useful. A tool that reviews contracts faster is valuable. But an agent that can handle a routine contract end-to-end, with appropriate guardrails and escalation, changes the operating model entirely.

Whether agentic AI is the final destination or a stepping stone to something further is an open question. What is clear is that it represents the most significant shift in how legal work gets done since the move to digital. And we are still early.

Trust is the gating factor. Legal work carries real consequences. No general counsel will delegate to a system they cannot oversee, audit, and correct. The platforms that win will be the ones that make trust easy: showing their reasoning, escalating when unsure, and keeping humans in the loop where it matters.

7. The Billing Model Between In-House and External Counsel Is Breaking

Hourly rates are under pressure, and AI is accelerating the conversation.

The panel on in-house and external counsel partnerships got honest about this fast. From the in-house side, the expectation is simple: if AI makes the work faster, the pricing should reflect that.

This is a structural shift, not just a negotiation tactic. When a contract review that used to take 4 hours takes 45 minutes with AI assistance, the old billing model breaks. Law firms that cling to hourly billing will face increasing pressure from clients who know what the tools can do.

Julia Taddei from Petrobras raised a sharp counterpoint: sometimes you are just paying for the letterhead. You need an external firm to commit to an opinion, to put their name behind it. That is real value. But for routine work? The pricing conversation is already shifting.

The direction of travel is toward project-based and value-based pricing. Firms that embrace this proactively will build stronger relationships. Firms that resist will find themselves competing on price anyway, but without the goodwill.

8. Compliance Is Rooted in Culture, Not Checklists

The compliance panel was one of the more human-centered discussions at the forum. The takeaway: compliance that relies on checklists and tick boxes will always be fragile. Compliance that is embedded in culture is resilient.

Rita Paukste framed it as resisting the urge to cut corners, throughout the company, not just in legal. The CEO's attitude toward compliance sets the tone for the entire organization.

Alexandre Schaff from Socomec shared a practical insight: after the training and the tick boxes, your real job as a compliance professional is to be a trusted advisor. A talk buddy. Not the person who sanctions, but the one who helps people navigate difficult situations.

The hardest part is what happens when things go wrong. Reducing blame is essential for building a culture where people actually report issues early. If people fear punishment, they hide things. If they trust the system, they surface concerns before they escalate.

This has implications for how legal teams use AI too. If the culture punishes mistakes, people will avoid using new tools. If the culture rewards learning and experimentation, adoption follows naturally.

9. The EU AI Act Is Already Playing Catch-Up

Pawel Lipski from Bird & Bird delivered a sharp session on AI contracting that raised a broader point: the EU AI Act may be amended before it is even fully in effect. The implementation infrastructure is not ready. National authorities and notified bodies are delayed. Harmonized standards are still being developed. The Commission's response: targeted recalibration, not deregulation.

AI develops faster than regulation can follow. That is not an argument against regulation. It is a reality that legal teams need to plan for. The frameworks you build today for AI governance need to be adaptable, not rigid.

A few practical points from the session that matter for any legal team evaluating AI:

• Read the terms for what models cannot be used for. Restrictions matter.
• You do not get deterministic results from AI. You get probabilistic ones. That distinction matters for contracting.
• Big AI providers do not take liability, but they will indemnify you, with caveats. Anything in pilot or beta comes with zero accountability.
• If you purchase AI, you are a deployer. But deployers can become providers under Article 25 if they modify or rebrand a high-risk system. The line is not as clear as most companies assume.

The teams that build flexible AI governance frameworks now, rather than waiting for regulation to settle, will be better positioned regardless of how the regulatory landscape evolves.

The Bigger Picture

If there is one thread that runs through all nine of these trends, it is this: the legal profession is at an inflection point where the technology is ready, but the organizations are not.

The tools exist. The AI is capable. The platforms are available. But the processes, the culture, the operating models, the incentive structures, and the governance frameworks are lagging behind.

The teams that will come out ahead are not the ones with the fanciest tools. They are the ones that fix their foundations first. Process before technology. Culture before compliance. Adoption before innovation.

That is not a pessimistic take. It is actually an optimistic one. Because if the bottleneck were technology, most legal teams would be stuck waiting for someone else to build the solution. But the bottleneck is organizational. And that is something every legal team can start working on today.

One thing that did not fit neatly into any single trend but came up throughout the forum deserves mention: the wellbeing and endurance of legal professionals. Alexandre Schaff spoke openly about worrying about his team's stress levels when they could not serve internal clients fast enough. Klaas Ehmen described the emotional weight of navigating a company through insolvency. Multiple speakers acknowledged that the pace of change, the volume of work, and the pressure to do more with less is taking a toll.

The promise of better tools and smarter automation should not only be about speed and efficiency. It should also be about giving legal professionals room to breathe. Less time on repetitive tasks means less burnout. Better systems mean fewer emergencies. These are good people doing difficult, consequential work. Making their working lives sustainable is not a side benefit of transformation. It is a reason to pursue it. And it remains one of the industry's most persistent challenges.

The Hague gave us a lot to think about. We will be writing more about several of these trends in the coming weeks. If any of this resonates and you want to explore what agentic AI looks like for your legal team, reach out to Aku Pollanen, or book a demo below.

Read the Full Recap

This article is our take on the trends. For the complete story of what happened at the forum, session by session, panel by panel, read our Global Legal Forum 2026: Play-by-Play from The Hague. It covers every speaker, every panel, and includes slides from the presentations.

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