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Legal technology budgets are on track to double by 2028 as specialised Legal AI Platforms deliver productivity and efficiency gains across key legal workflows, according to Gartner.
Platforms such as Harvey, Legora, GC AI and Thomson Reuters CoCounsel are already accelerating routine legal work, with the research firm identifying six specific capabilities where these tools are having a measurable impact on in-house legal teams.
Multi-Agent Applications Offering Relief To Burned-Out Legal Teams
Weston Wicks, Senior Director Analyst in the Gartner Legal & Compliance Practice, pointed to early evidence of tangible benefits from multi-agent legal applications.
“Early evidence suggests multi-agent legal applications offer gains in productivity, reduced reliance on external counsel, and improvements in compliance, though outcomes will vary depending on implementation and organisational context,” Wicks noted.
“These applications are designed to accelerate routine workflows, extract key insights, and help to orchestrate complex legal processes, freeing up lawyers’ time to focus on providing strategic advice, risk management and high-value client service.”
Wicks characterised the arrival of these tools as a potential turning point for overworked legal departments.
“If implemented effectively, multi-agent legal applications offer a light at the end of the tunnel for burned out legal teams facing persistent disruption and an ever more complex and dynamic legal, compliance and risk landscape,” he observed. “The rapid growth of multi-agent legal applications is evident in both rising investment and the increasing number of available tools in the market.”
Six Key Capabilities Identified
Gartner analysts have identified six capabilities commonly found in Legal AI Applications that are delivering benefits to legal departments.
The first is accelerated legal research through natural language queries, with higher reliability when applications integrate directly with primary research databases.
The second covers faster case preparation and litigation support by automating document analysis, reducing administrative workload and enabling earlier, data-driven case assessments.
Third is automated contract review and redlining that applies playbooks, flags risks and proposes edits while keeping lawyers in full control of acceptance decisions.
Fourth, comprehensive contract analysis and metadata extraction identifies nonstandard terms, liabilities and key dates to support real-time portfolio visibility.
Fifth, the tools can accelerate M&A due diligence by rapidly categorising and assessing large volumes of contracts and filings, compressing review timelines from weeks to days.
The sixth capability involves end-to-end agentic workflow orchestration that automates multistep legal processes from intake through analysis and drafting, reducing manual handoffs and administrative friction.
Half Of Contract Reviews Delegated To Self-Service Systems By 2029
Looking further ahead, Gartner expects AI to reshape how legal departments handle routine requests and contract reviews.
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“By 2029, approximately 50 per cent of contract reviews will be delegated to self-service systems that escalate only one in 10 for human review,” Wicks predicted. “In the same timeframe, we predict that 60 per cent of legal departments will use AI-driven intake systems that capture all requests and answer one-half of those without human intervention.”
How The Platforms Work
Legal AI Platforms combine specialised and general-purpose AI agents, coordinated through structured workflows, to address the practical requirements of in-house legal teams. Some tools can draw on both extensive legal databases and an organisation’s proprietary data, which has the potential to help general counsel and their teams improve efficiency, manage risk more effectively and support consistent, well-informed decision-making.
The Gartner Enterprise Risk, Audit & Compliance Conference is scheduled for Grapevine, Texas on September 15-16, 2026, and London on September 28-29, 2026. Gartner clients can access further detail in the firm’s report, Innovation Insight: Legal AI Platforms, while non-clients can find complementary content at AI in the Legal Industry.
Last Updated on May 27, 2026 by Nick Ross
