Top Legal Technology Trends For In-House Teams in 2025

Back in 2022, when ChatGPT was first released to the public, it was a novelty.

Less than three years later, generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has become a go-to tool in just about every industry, and adoption by businesses across the globe has skyrocketed thanks to its cutting-edge advancements.

The rapid rise of this tech, which seemingly came out of nowhere, underscores an important fact. If businesses plan to stay competitive, keeping up with the latest technology trends isn’t optional — it’s essential.

A key area where GenAI has been gaining traction is in the legal sector — sparking more significant conversations about the value of legal tech overall and how in-house legal teams should be optimizing their operations. But as teams hit the ground running in 2025, keeping track of the best new technology options and the latest legal tech trends feels like just another task on a long list.

What’s the key to staying ahead of the curve? A quick read through our guide to the top legal technology trends in 2025 is the perfect way to get started. Here’s what you should have on your radar.

Legal Tech Trend #1: Purpose-built Legal GenAI Assistants

For the first year after its emergence, most people, including business users, were still experimenting with general-purpose GenAI. In other words, tools like ChatGPT which can write you a song as easily as a line of code.

As we moved into 2024, however, purpose-built solutions, trained on industry-specific data, started proliferating to meet the needs of specific sectors and use cases.

The legal tech industry was similarly busy, with many legal tech firms working on custom-built, high-value generative artificial intelligence and automation solutions for in-house legal teams.

Brightflag’s own team was hard at work on Ask Brightflag— the first GenAI assistant dedicated solely to helping in-house teams manage legal spend and matters.

The idea behind the tool is similar to what GenAI is doing for other industries. In other words, Ask Brightflag has been trained on legal data and plugs into company-specific data to help in-house teams rapidly answer questions like:

• “What are our top open matters by spend?”
• “What is our legal spend this year broken down by department?”
• “Which law firms have we engaged most this year, and on which matters?”

Our Prediction

These kinds of AI-driven legal tech solutions are set to become a core component of strategic legal operations this year, as in-house teams look for ways to streamline workflows, automate administrative tasks, and reduce heavy manual review of straightforward spending and matter data.

So in 2025, expect to see adoption of purpose-built GenAI accelerate, including across the legal industry.

Legal Tech Trend #2: Legal Teams Will Become Prompt Engineers

One of the first things most of us have learned in working with GenAI tools is that the outputs the tools produce are only as good as the instructions you give them.

The upshot of that realization is “prompt engineering” — the process of designing precise “prompts” or sets of instructions to guide GenAI tools to produce the most valuable output in a specific context.

Anthropic, the creators of Claude AI, put it like this: “When interacting with Claude, think of it as a brilliant but very new employee (with amnesia) who needs explicit instructions. Like any new employee, Claude does not have context on your norms, styles, guidelines, or preferred ways of working. The more precisely you explain what you want, the better Claude’s response will be.”

When it comes to legal teams, that means being able to craft the perfect prompt so that your GenAI assistant can produce accurate responses to legal queries. A big part of getting that right starts with using a dedicated legal tool — preferably one trained on legal data and legal research, with access to context-specific information (see Trend #1 above).

Our Prediction

By 2026, prompt engineering skills will be essential for in-house teams — so that they can leverage purpose-built gen AI tools to simplify tasks from contract and document review to legal spend tracking, and facilitate faster decision-making.

The good news is that legal professionals already have a lot of the skills they need to excel at this prompt engineering, like paying careful attention to language and phrasing and analyzing the most critical aspects of an issue. The leaders in this space, however, will be legal ops teams, who will become the organizational “go-to’s” for legal prompt engineering.

Legal Tech Trend #3: Tech Budgets Will Stay Tight

Throughout 2023 and 2024, budgets for legal tech were tight, with many teams needing to justify why new tools were a must-have. As we head into 2025, budgets will likely stay under scrutiny, but there is also increased interest in the use of legal tech tools and AI technology to alleviate workloads.

That’s especially important in an environment where we’re seeing the pressures on in-house teams mounting up — in tandem with the realization that keeping legal work in-house is often a lot more cost-effective than engaging outside counsel. Tech tools offer the perfect way to help in-house teams strike the right balance.

AI adoption is a big part of shaping this trend, with more than one-third of GCs stating that they plan on investing in virtual legal assistants, and more than a quarter adding that they’re interested in AI-powered predictive analytics and data management tools.

Our Prediction

Legal tech tools will make up a key part of the in-house team’s strategy 2025 as their potential for relieving other budgetary pressures becomes more evident. But it won’t always be easy to convince the finance function that they’re a must-have for in-house teams.

The key for forward-thinking legal teams in this context will be to present a tight business case for why implementing these tools is a necessity, and to be able to quantify the return on investment (ROI) that different legal tech providers can deliver on critical projects.

Legal Tech Trend #4: Enhanced Visibility into Legal Work and Spend Remains Critical

Hand-in-hand with adopting AI to streamline workflows will be increased reliance on tech tools that improve visibility into legal work and spending.

As teams are pressured to become more efficient, tools like e-billing and legal matter management software will become increasingly vital. These systems help teams to track the lifecycle of their legal matters, monitor legal spending in real-time, and ensure internal (and external) budget compliance.

The caveat? The teams that realize the most significant benefits from legal tech will be those that integrate it as part of a well-conceived legal department strategy.

Equally important is making sure the tool you pick makes it easier, not harder, to access data. In other words, teams need to pick tools that make data about legal spending and matters available in a centralized location. One that’s easy for all team members to access for fast, actionable insights.

Our Prediction

In 2025, real-time spend insights and proactive matter management will take center stage even more than in previous years.

To stay on top of their workflows, teams will need software that provides a unified view of legal matters and legal spending and how these fit into the legal department’s (and business-wide) objectives.

Staying Ahead of The Legal Tech Curve

The changing tech landscape in 2025 is likely to make this another year where in-house teams need to be quick on their feet. But while sifting through your legal tech tool choices can feel overwhelming, the good news is that there are some great (and straightforward) options out there.

Brightflag’s AI-powered e-billing and matter management platform is purpose-built to help in-house legal teams streamline their workflows, gain complete visibility into legal work and spend, and simplify their decision-making when it comes to delivering legal services. It also centralizes all your data and automates time-consuming tasks like invoicing and reporting, freeing your team for more important tasks, such as making sure that critical partnership agreements get signed off without a hitch.

And now, with Ask Brightflag, our generative AI legal assistant, your team has even more options at their fingertips. Using your company’s own data, Ask Brightflag provides instant insights into legal matters and spending — with conversation instead of clicks.

Want to learn more? Book a demo, and let us show you the smartest, simplest, fastest way to make the best legal tech work for you.