AI is moving into the mainstream and reshaping how law firms operate. A whopping 79% of legal professionals used AI in 2024, a striking increase from just 19% the year before. It’s also affecting alternative legal services, now a $28.5 billion industry that’s using generative AI to partner and compete with traditional law firms.
Speaking at Inspire (the NetDocuments user conference), Ed Sohn, Global Head of Insights and Innovation at Factor, said, “The thing that people love to say is that lawyers with AI are going to replace lawyers without AI. It’s not that AI is going to replace a lawyer’s job, but I think when people say that [they mean] the future of legal practice is going to include AI.”
Many law firms and corporate legal departments are trying to determine how to best incorporate AI into their daily work so they aren’t left behind.
A NetDocuments report, 2025 Legal Tech Trends, examined research and input from hundreds of industry experts to pinpoint the trends shaping AI-driven legal practices. It found AI is influencing recruitment, partnerships, contract renewals, ethics, transparency and billing methods, among other areas.
Here we’ll look at two of those trends – agentic AI and bringing AI to where your content already lives – to see how they are redefining the legal industry.
AI Agents: The Law Firm’s Secret Weapon
2025 is the era of agent-to-agent or “agentic” AI, or AI that functions like an additional, highly efficient legal assistant on the team and means the law firm can deliver its services faster than ever before. While it might take a human associate or paralegal hours or even days to review and analyze long contracts, conduct research, and scan and extract relevant information to ensure compliance and identify potential risks, AI can do much of that tedious work very quickly and consistently.
AI “agents” can also draft and refine documents by analyzing databases of prior law and offering suggestions that align with precedent and best practices contained in playbooks. Or, better yet, have the AI generate the playbook based on your precedent documents. AI can even help assess how likely a case is to succeed by using predictive analysis of past rulings and judge behaviors.
The Intelligent DMS as Your AI Powerhouse
AI-powered document management systems are another trend that is transforming legal workflows and how you interact with the expertise contained in your content. An AI-enhanced DMS solution can analyze contracts and case files, highlighting clauses, potential liabilities and missing provisions that need attention. It can automate workflows, extract key data, provide AI-powered summaries of legal documents, and keep legal writing consistent and accurate to reduce errors and ensure compliance.
Using a DMS that integrates AI within it – rather than exporting your legal content to an external AI platform – prevents the security risks of moving sensitive client information outside a controlled environment and keeps confidential and privileged information secure by respecting established permissions and ethical walls. It also aligns with regulatory compliance requirements.
“It’s not about bringing your content to AI; it’s about bringing AI to your content,” says Josh Baxter, CEO of NetDocuments.
Dive Deeper into the Full Report
To learn more about these and other legal tech trends that are reshaping legal operations and helping teams streamline their workflows, cut costs, and drive success, download the 2025 Legal Tech Trends Report.