ILTACON 2026 became Legalweek - to nobody's surprise. The legal tech market has been upended.

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In the old day, ILTACON and Legalweek were completely separate conferences. While they are/were premier events in the legal technology industry, they used to target different audiences with contrasting operational focuses.

AI changed all that.

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Not sure about the virtual reality glasses, but I like to concept. The new graphic cover for the Business Insider and market research pitch deck for the legal tech industry - traditional law bends to the new technology.

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BY:

Paul Damato

Legal Technology Reporter

Members of the Project Counsel Media team

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3 September 2026 (Washington, DC) - If there was one common, oft-repeated comment at ILTACON 2026 this year it was this one by a legal tech director from a BigLaw firm:

"I've been doing ILTA for 20+ years and I have never seen it this packed, never seen the exhibit halls this packed with vendors. And the vendors had giant booths.

Plus so many start up booths which you never saw before.

Clearly the ILTA organizers picked up hints from Legalweek on the physical setup of the exhibit hall.

Then I realized 'Holy Crap! This IS Legalweek! All the same vendors, all the same people'. You never saw 1/2 these people at ILTA. Legal staffing agencies never attended this event. Nor the lower level trench warfare legal tech vendors. Plus the session agenda was indistinguishable from the one at Legalweek.

And with ILTACON announcing several major event partnerships and new legal technology events . . . Jesus wept! Legal tech events will be unending.

A shame really. But it's the future of this market. The AI competition is going to get brutal and vendors realize they need to attend every event".

He is on to something.

In the old days, the core audience at ILTA was the law firm IT crowd, KM directors, plus the security and legal ops folks. Legalweek had legal executives, litigators, vendors, and buyers.

In the old days, ILTA was about peer-led enterprise tech deployment and governance. ILTACON focused on back-end infrastructure, security, change management. No "commercial announcements". Legalweek was about the commercial product launches, new partnership announcements, and eDiscovery evaluations.

This year in Nashville, it all merged. You had the exact same crowd at both events, almost all the same vendors in the exhibit hall, and you could not keep up with the new commercial product launches, and new partnership announcements.

What's changed? AI. There is a new sheriff in town. Actually, a few sheriffs.

Six months ago, Anthropic Legal, Harvey, and Legora were new legal/legal tech tools law firms were testing.

Now over half the legal industry are calling them foundational, the infrastructure all legal work will be built on.

And old-line, legacy legal tech companies are struggling to make deals with them. Because they know in very short order they will own the market. As repeated ad nauseum at ILTACON 2026, the legal market has moved past the pilot phase and started depending on AI, implementing AI.

Anthropic's technology and partner integrations featured all over ILTACON this year, though Anthropic participated primarily through ecosystem partners rather than as a standalone direct legal exhibitor.

Major legal tech partners like Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg Law (two of our media partners covering the event) highlighted their integrations with Anthropic's Claude. And Anthropic recently expanded its legal market presence by introducing legal practice plug-ins and integrations with platforms like Harvey and Thomson Reuters, which were central discussion topics at the event.

Note to readers: for our analysis of the pipes, wires and tubes of Anthropic Legal please click here.

These are no longer tools. They are infrastructure. Study after study after study shows Harvey and Legora customers have found high usage, fast impact, and an early cohort of power users pulling ahead. The Business Insider study, one of the largest studies combining a survey of 102 organizations with 54 long-form interviews, shows not only how Harvey and Legora deliver value, but how deeply they have been built into the way legal work happens.

The clearest sign of maturity is what users now count. Six months ago, value was a proxy game: logins, query volumes, workplace satisfaction. Today, most law firms (77%) justify their licence spend by pointing to better legal and commercial outcomes, and 68% of in-house teams measure value by their freedom to focus on higher-value work. As one Reed Smith interviewee put it, partners no longer want to hear that lots of people are using it: they want to know what those people are doing and why it matters.

That shift is showing up in economics, not just sentiment.

[See our $$$ analysis at the end of this post for the important skinny].

Among law firms able to track the changes:

59% saw lawyer utilization rise
44% saw revenue increase
53% saw profitability improve

The operational gain is the visible part - 89% of firms say Harvey lets them take on more work – but it is increasingly translating into the numbers that reach the bottom line.

The findings show an industry evolving at remarkable speed. Legal professionals are rapidly moving from using AI as a productivity tool to relying on it as a foundational part of how legal work gets done. The organizations seeing the greatest impact are those investing in adoption, integration and capability-building, demonstrating that AI enablement is becoming a core competitive advantage across the legal sector.

And though still ripe with danger, AI agents have arrived faster than expected. Agentic AI is often discussed as imminent. Research shows it is already operational. A striking 68% of both law firms and in-house teams have deployed Harvey-based agents, and over a fifth of law firms (21%) are running more than 50 in production.

Integration is what makes this stick: firms point to document management systems, Microsoft 365 and MCP/API as the features that turn Harvey from a useful assistant into core delivery infrastructure.

But as we walked the halls of ILTACON we heard the pricing disconnect is growing. The research surfaces a widening gap between what law firms believe they are telling clients and what clients say they hear:

61% of firms report proactively discussing Harvey-driven efficiencies with clients
Only 1 in 25 in-house respondents say a firm has approached them about it
With almost half of in-house teams (48%) now mandating that their firms use AI, the pressure is moving to the client side – and the firms that close this gap first will be the ones that keep the relationship

And it's why the legacy eDiscovery and traditional legal software providers are scrambling to actively integrate with or license capabilities from fast-moving generative AI platforms like Legora to bridge the gap between heavy document repositories and modern AI workflows. Some are forging direct interoperability deals - such as integrations connecting discovery engines like Everlaw and Legora directly into Legora. As one industry pundit told me here at the event:

"Look, a lot of these legacy eDiscovery and traditional legal software providers know their number is up and they hope to get acquired before they fade away. There are several vendors here solely to try and sell themselves. Or in the alternative, do an interoperability deal with the new kids on the block who will soon take over this space.

The legal tech market is undergoing a massive transformation as generative AI-native startups force legacy eDiscovery and legal tech companies to aggressively adapt through partnerships, acquisitions, and ecosystem integrations. Incumbents face an unprecedented threat to traditional seat-based pricing models and linear document review workflows. The old days are gone".

And that's why this year's ILTACON looked just like Legalweek.

And it is why you need to watch what the Big Dogs are doing:

Harvey has been connecting the platform more deeply into the software where legal work lives. Its integrations cover transaction systems, document environments and Microsoft workflows, and its newest product work includes a proprietary legal model called Tenet. Building its own model is a notable move for a company that originally depended heavily on outside foundation-model providers.

Legora is expanding in a similar direction through integrations and acquisitions. It has recently connected more closely with enterprise-content systems such as Box and DeepJudge while adding specialist legal capabilities to its own platform.

The direction is becoming clearer. Legal AI companies want to sit inside the matter from beginning to end, with access to the firm's documents, knowledge, rules and workflows. If they succeed, the amount companies can charge will depend much less on the price of a chatbot seat.

And the $$$$ side of all this? Let's pool what we learned from reading the Thomson Reuters Legal Professionals revenue review, the RELX Legal revenue, Fortune magazine and PitchDeck.

Because what they say matters more than private valuations or fundraising announcements. Adoption data helps show whether the products are becoming part of real legal work, while funding and valuations are treated mainly as evidence of investor expectations and competitive intensity - and there was far too much talk about the latter at ILTACON this year.

And remember the industry history. The previous big waves of legal software were digitized libraries, billing, documents, email and case management. Those products saved time, but they rarely drafted a contract, reviewed thousands of pages for contradictions or researched a legal question themselves.

Generative AI changed that:

Harvey now sells software for research, drafting, due diligence, litigation and transactional work.
Legora covers research, review and drafting and has been buying specialist products in areas such as regulatory monitoring and litigation intelligence.
Thomson Reuters has embedded CoCounsel into products used by lawyers every day, while LexisNexis is pushing Lexis+ AI and Protégé.

The timing helps explain why the market suddenly feels much bigger. The technology has moved from “maybe useful someday” to software that large legal organizations can deploy across actual matters. That gives law firms and legal departments a reason to open new budgets instead of merely replacing one old database with another.

There is a lot to digest across the 4 reports I noted above, so I'll just bullet point the key numbers:

The legal tech market is growing strongly now, with the broad market expanding around high-single to low-double digits while legal AI is growing much faster inside it.

The clearest evidence is not venture funding or private valuations. U.S. law firms increased technology spending by 9.7% and knowledge-management spending by 10.5% in 2025, both far ahead of core inflation.

Incumbents are growing at the same time as AI-native challengers: Thomson Reuters Legal Professionals and RELX Legal are both running around 10% growth, which makes the current expansion look more like a larger software wallet than a simple transfer of budget from old vendors to new ones.

Legal AI has already become a meaningful revenue category of its own:

Clio is above $500 million in ARR
Harvey has been reported around $350 million in annualized revenue
Legora around $150 million
AI-native companies in general are compounding far faster than the broader market

Adoption is no longer confined to innovation teams inside BigLaw. AI use is widespread across large firms, smaller practices and corporate legal teams, and the amount of unauthorized “shadow AI” suggests demand is moving faster than formal procurement and governance.

The product shift is more important than the chatbot hype. Legal software used to organize the work around lawyers; the fastest-growing products now research, draft, review, compare, investigate and increasingly run multi-step pieces of the legal workflow itself.

The acquisition wave fits that change. Harvey, Legora, Clio, RELX, Wolters Kluwer and Relativity are buying specialist capabilities because the strategic prize is becoming the legal workspace, not one isolated research or drafting feature.

The biggest constraint may come from law-firm economics rather than model quality. And this was much discussed at ILTACON this year. AI can save hours immediately, but firms still need to turn those saved hours into more matters, higher-value work or new pricing models if they want efficiency to become profit.

Anthropic, Google, and other foundation-model companies plan a major focus on the legal market in 2027. All of them say they will focus on making 3 areas cheaper than the legacy legal tech providers:
basic drafting
document summarization and eDiscovery
contract comparison

But further to that point I just made, we already see it. Anthropic already showed how sensitive this market is. When it introduced legal workflows for Claude, investors quickly marked down Thomson Reuters, RELX and Wolters Kluwer because contract review, compliance work and legal analysis suddenly looked easier to reproduce with a general model.

Google has now gone much further. Its newly launched Gemini Enterprise for Legal brings specialized legal agents into Google's enterprise AI platform and connects them with systems including iManage, NetDocuments, Relativity, Everlaw, DocuSign and Thomson Reuters.

The interesting part is that Google also integrates Harvey and Legora. Google could have tried to replace those companies entirely. Instead, its initial architecture treats specialist legal AI as part of the ecosystem.

That gives us a better picture of where competition is heading. Basic drafting, summarization and eDiscoveery, and contract comparison will get cheaper. The harder products to displace will control trusted legal content, firm-specific knowledge, permissions, workflow integration and specialist tools that lawyers already rely on.

Harvey's recent decision to develop Tenet, its own legal model, shows that the leading startups understand the risk. They are trying to own more of the technology underneath their products instead of remaining simple interfaces over somebody else's model.

Specialist legal tech therefore has to defend itself with trusted content, firm-specific knowledge, permissions, integrations and workflow depth rather than a thin AI interface.

Funding is still historically high, but it is no longer accelerating cleanly. More than $2.2 billion has gone into legal tech startups so far this year after a record $4.6 billion last year, and a large share of the capital is concentrated in a few leaders.

Private valuations are running much faster than customer budgets. Harvey and Legora can justify premium multiples only if they keep compounding at exceptional rates for years, so the market can be genuinely strong while some individual valuations are still too aggressive.

And why are the "new" legal tech companies buying so many startups, along with the well-funded legacy legal tech companies? They are buying startups at an unusually fast pace because the leading platforms are racing to own more of the lawyer's workflow before competitors do:

Legora has been particularly aggressive. It has acquired at least five companies this year, including businesses covering legal research, regulation monitoring, real-estate intelligence and litigation fact analysis. Its Wexler acquisition added technology that helps litigators build timelines and find contradictions across large case files.

Harvey has made three acquisitions this year. Its latest, Benchmark, extends Harvey into decision infrastructure for asset managers and came after a quarter in which Harvey said it added more than $100 million in net-new ARR.

The established companies are buying, too:

Clio completed its $1 billion acquisition of vLex, bringing a large legal-research database directly into its platform.
Wolters Kluwer has paid $500 million for Brightflag and $105 million for Libra.
RELX has moved to acquire French legal-AI company Doctrine
Relativity bought AI drafting startup Gavel.

Repeated acquisitions by Legora, Harvey, Clio, RELX, Wolters Kluwer and Relativity point to a platform race across research, drafting, litigation, contracts, knowledge and operations.

The overall picture is therefore unusually clear: legal tech is expanding, legal AI is pulling the category forward, and the next fight is about who controls the workflow. It is going to be a bumpy ride for legacy legal tech.

The uncertainty is less about whether the market is growing than about how the new spending will be split between specialist AI vendors, established legal-information companies and the big AI platforms.

But the key thing is this: legal AI is doing much more of the acceleration than older categories such as practice management or traditional research databases. The market is growing, but its center of gravity is moving rapidly toward AI. It will be the new sheriffs that run the town in the future.

Our ILTA 2026 coverage:

Teaching law firm associates to write well with responsible AI will be the trick. It definitely is a balancing act. The trick is moving them away from "generate an entire document" to using AI as an editor, sounding board, and outline partner. When associates rely too heavily on AI to do the thinking, their writing loses its unique perspective and critical edge. For more click here.

Legora joins Google's legal-focused AI platform. The purpose of Google's legal-focused AI platform, Gemini Enterprise for Legal, is to shift AI usage from passive text prompting into autonomous, "agentic" execution of complex workflows for law firms and in-house legal teams. Developed alongside premier law firms like Cleary Gottlieb and Freshfields, its power lies in its ability to securely execute high-risk legal tasks within the exact software environments lawyers use every day. For more click here.

The heavyweights behind financing the legal technology ecosystem are getting behind Newcode, the startup that has developed a centralized legal workspace and operating system for law firms. For more click here.

The perils of AI - "vibe lawyering". Vibe lawyering is a trend where lawyers (and non-lawyers) use artificial intelligence tools instead of a human lawyer to handle legal research, draft motions, or manage court filings. For more click here.

Legal AI is shifting from attorney prompting to AI handling work. The overarching theme among legal tech pioneers is a structural paradigm shift: legal AI is transitioning from chat-based attorney prompting to autonomous, multi-agent operating systems that handle complex legal workflows from start to finish. For more click here.

An inside look at how Anthropic Legal uses AI. Anthropic's technology and partner integrations are featured at ILTACON 2026 this week, though Anthropic participates primarily through ecosystem partners rather than as a standalone direct legal exhibitor. Major legal tech partners like Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg Law (two of our media partners with whom we are covering the event) are highlighting their integrations with Anthropic's Claude at the conference. And Anthropic recently expanded its legal market presence by introducing legal practice plug-ins and integrations with platforms like Harvey and Thomson Reuters, which will be central discussion topics at the event. For more click here.

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