2026 Predictions: Brightflag’s Kevin Cohn on Legal Ops & Legal Tech

Editor’s note: Each year, Kevin Cohn, Brightflag’s Chief Customer Officer offers his predictions for the coming year. Catch up on his 2022 predictions, 2023 predictions, 2024 predictions, and 2025 predictions.

I’m back for a fifth consecutive year to offer my predictions. Read on for my self-scored 2025 predictions, and my 2026 predictions.

Scoring My 2025 Legal Operations and Legal Technology Predictions

1. Flight to purpose-built AI: Hit. Look no further than OpenAI updating its usage policies to prohibit the provision of advice that requires a license, such as legal or medical advice. These types of use cases demand expert solutions.
2. The year of AI assistants: Hit. According to a McKinsey report, 62% of organizations are experimenting with AI assistants. Libra, an AI assistant for research, drafting, and review, is an exciting example in the legal domain.
3. Prompts become core IP: Miss. The U.S. Copyright Office stated that prompts do not qualify for copyright protection. In my defense, what I meant by “IP” was “highly valuable” rather than “legally protected,” but rules are rules.
4. AI remains largely unregulated: Unclear. A 10-year ban on U.S. state-level AI regulation was removed from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, demonstrating an unexpected openness to near-term regulation.
5. Cloud laggards move: Unclear. AI is clearly accelerating movement to the cloud, but in the absence of concrete data showing a reduction in the percentage of IT spend going towards on-premises software, I’m scoring it as unclear.
6. CLOs and ops come together: Hit. The L Suite acquired LINK, saying, “This integration…will allow General Counsels and their legal ops teams to learn from each other in a way that hasn’t been possible before.”
7. Community is in: Hit. Anna Richards, a legal ops luminary, recently joined Brightflag as our first Head of Community. And we aren’t the only ones: this year no fewer than five other legal tech companies have hired people in similar roles.
8. Customer service shines: Hit. Brightflag’s outstanding reputation for customer service was a key reason for Wolters Kluwer acquiring the company. As I frequently say, B2B is really person-to-person, and that’s where customer service shines.
9. CLM consolidation continues: Miss. With the exception of Icertis’s acquisition of subscale Dioptra, it’s been an unexpectedly quiet year for the CLM category (at least in terms of consolidation; Ironclad has a new CEO).
10. Brightflag has a great year: Hit. As part of a publicly-traded company, I can’t share as much about our performance as I could in the past. This will have to suffice: by every conceivable measure, we’ve had a great year.

Six hits, two misses, and two unclear. I should quit while I’m ahead!

But I won’t… let’s move on to my 2026 predictions.

My 2026 Legal Operations and Legal Technology Predictions

1. Corporate legal’s remit expands: Legal will own AI policy, compliance, information security, and privacy, advantaging in-house attorneys over outside counsel because they have greater context and situational awareness.
2. NPS becomes the legal KPI: Business stakeholders want more visibility and lower costs from corporate legal. NPS is an effective way for General Counsel to measure their sentiment while continuing to appropriately manage risk.
3. Legal ops explodes: Each year, Brightflag publishes the definitive legal ops compensation report. The number of open positions increased by 23% year-over-year in 2025; this year, I expect more than 50% growth.
4. Legal ops events get (much) better: There’s never been more competition for legal ops events than there is today. Competition is good for customers and this will drive every event organizer to meaningfully improve their offerings.
5. Frontier models are not applications: Are OpenAI, Anthropic, and the like infrastructure or application providers? Put another way, will they compete with existing legal tech or will legal tech companies build on top of them? I think the latter.
6. Expert solutions become essential: In the age of generative AI, Wolters Kluwer’s slogan, “when you have to be right,” is prescient. Knowledge and know-how are not the same thing; professionals (like legal) need expert solutions.
7. The hourly-vs.-not debate dies down: If all outside counsel pricing magically changed to not-hourly overnight (spoiler: it won’t), the cost would still be too high. This year will see an increased focus on data-informed ROI.
8. Legal tech categories converge: Software categories follow a predictable pattern: specialization followed by platformization. In the last two years we’ve seen a lot of the former; in the coming year I expect we’ll see more of the latter.
9. CLM consolidation resumes: With churn remaining high and true AI-native entrants redefining core contracting workflows, consolidation is virtually guaranteed. To make the prediction bolder, I think we’ll see two mega-mergers in 2026.
10. Brightflag has a great year: Coming off a banner year by any measure, we’re set up for a dynamite 2026, driven by fantastic customers and a nearly 70% increase in product development capacity over the next three months.

I hope you have a safe and happy year ahead.