By Tom Saunders
The 11th British Legal Technology Forum brought more than 90 legal tech suppliers, law firms and in-house teams to London’s Old Billingsgate last week to talk about AI and the future of legal services. As Legal IT Insider readers will know, these are not small topics, so there was a lot to talk about.
The picture that emerged from Legal IT Insider’s conversations with buyers and vendors was of a sector whose focus is shifting as it matures: from a preoccupation with particular AI features (what can this tool do?), to the harder, more strategic work of achieving widespread AI use (how can we use this tool most effectively?)
Josephine Kenny, director of client value and innovation at Litera, summed up the state of the market. “Competition [is] fierce, with firms using the same technology now,” she told Legal IT Insider. “Corporate in-house teams [are] taking work in-house, because they have the same AI too, and billing need[s] to change to reflect the use of AI and efficiencies gained.”
Many attendees made clear that these developments have put security and governance at the top of the agenda, not just to minimise risk but also to maximise returns on investment.
From point solutions to platforms
Perhaps in line with the above observation there is a market shift: a member of a global law firm’s finance team noted that there are far fewer point solutions – specialised software packages for particular business functions – than four years ago: “Everything is a platform now.”
That may be an exaggeration – point solutions have not disappeared – but platform solutions such as Litera and Clio have certainly become more prominent in recent years, while many point solutions are expanding their capabilities. Aidan Hawes, EMEA director of sales at Clio, told Legal IT Insider that this reflected customer demand. “Buyers are increasingly sceptical of AI point solutions or fragmented tech stacks that implement AI individually in different ways,” he said. “Firms want AI that works inside the systems they already use, and has the context of their matters.”
While some law firms are consolidating around fewer, broader tech platforms, others are looking to connect their preferred tools in a standardised way. Knowledge work platform iManage was keen to emphasise that it has adopted the Model Context Protocol, a vendor-neutral standard developed by AI company Anthropic that, in this context, allows organisations securely to connect AI tools to their document management systems. Law firms and in-house teams can apply AI to their iManage data with the correct permissions and ethical walls in place. “The AI landscape is moving so fast, firms need flexibility to try different things out,” said Paul Bower, iManage’s AI director. “They want to try different vendors, they want to try different solutions, but they are all going to keep coming back to the fact that they need to access the data in a governed way securely.”
For point solutions, too, the latest developments in AI are opening up new possibilities. “People used to look at e-discovery and say, ‘That’s a litigation need, it’s separate to our overall tech strategy’, but in the last two years there has been more overlap,” said Nicole Hazaz, customer success director at Everlaw. “[Now] a lot more people are asking, ‘where else can I be using this technology?” She suggested that e-discovery tools could serve other data-heavy functions, such as managing data privacy or responding to cyber-attacks, and pointed to corporate use cases, such as archiving data when employees leave.
Customer concerns
One clearly discernible trend at BLTF 2026 was that many parts of the legal tech ecosystem are now focusing on helping clients get the most out of AI tools. “Twelve months ago, most customers would ask if the platform has a specific feature or if it can understand a 300-page document,” said Alex Fortescue-Webb, global head of legal engineering at Legora. “Now it is, “How can we take full advantage of it?’”
The answer, Fortescue-Webb says, simply comes down to adoption. “If you don’t adopt, the ROI is zero,” he says, though he acknowledges that this is easier said than done, with multiple decisions required. One thing that helps, he adds, is focus, by deploying AI in just two or three areas first. “People see what’s happening and start to apply it elsewhere,” he says. “It’s much better doing that than trying to find 1,000 use cases and solve them all.”
At the same time, customers are determined not to lose control of their data . Sid Jiwani, director at information management company Knovos, pointed to the rise of “bring your own cloud”, where clients host applications on their own cloud instead of on a vendor’s. “The cost of having your own cloud has decreased dramatically in recent years,” Jiwani said. “[And] people want more ownership over their data.”
While “bring your own cloud” is not a new concept, it illustrates how important data governance is to firms and in-house teams looking to get the most out of their AI investments. If there was one take-home from BLTF 2026, it was that the legal tech sector is leaving the “AI feature race” behind and moving on to an “AI deployment era”, where the differentiators are businesses’ data foundations and governance, tech integration and commercial strategy.
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