Research briefings

The United States faces a civil legal aid crisis that technology has promised to solve for over a decade. Approximately 92% of the civil legal needs of low-income Americans go unmet, according to the Legal Services Corporation's 2022 Justice Gap Report — a figure that...

The legal profession's relationship with remote work has moved well past the emergency pivot of 2020 into something more deliberate and contested. Law firms and in-house legal departments are now three-plus years into operating distributed teams at scale, and the evidence base is substantial enough...

The legal technology sector entered 2026 riding a wave of investor conviction that has survived the broader venture capital contraction remarkably well. While total VC deployment across technology sectors declined roughly 18% from peak 2021 levels, legal tech demonstrated unusual resilience, with global investment holding...

Twelve months ago, the legal industry was absorbing a wave of vendor promises that bordered on the messianic. AI would draft contracts in seconds, eliminate associates, democratize legal services, and compress billing cycles. Twelve months later, the picture is considerably more textured. Generative AI has...

The billable hour has survived every predicted obituary written against it. Since the American Bar Association formally endorsed time-based billing in 1958, reformers have periodically announced its imminent collapse — and been wrong. But the current pressure on the model is structurally different from previous...

The legal operations profession has matured dramatically over the past decade, evolving from a niche cost-management function into a strategic discipline that commands serious compensation packages and genuine career architecture. The 2025 CLOC State of the Industry Survey—the most comprehensive annual benchmark for the field—recorded...