Gartner says legal tech budgets will DOUBLE by 2028.

By 2029 about half of contract reviews will run on self-service systems, and only one in ten will still go to a human.

That's a lot of tech to invest in between here and there.

But the size of the budget was never the whole problem.

Law firms have underinvested in IT for decades.

Tech spend still sits around 2.4% of revenue, per the 2026 Citi Hildebrandt report put together by Gretta Rusanow and Brad Hildebrandt

Accounting, the closest professional-services cousin, spends roughly double that.

Doubling a number that started too small does not fix the gap by itself.

That money usually buys more off-the-shelf point tools. Generic by default.

Harvey or Legora are outstanding tools but if you buy them, your competitors can buy the exact same thing.

This differentiates no one.

Worse, most firms will bolt those tools onto systems that were never built to feed them clean, connected data.

AI is only as good as the data underneath it, and most firms have a shaky data foundation for it to stand on.

The dollars that matter do not show up as a software line item.

They go to rationalizing the data you actually own, the integration layer that connects your back-office systems, and the change management, training, and process work that few put in a budget deck.

The unglamorous stuff.

So by all means, double the budget.

Just be deliberate about where the second dollar goes.

The firms that spend it building the foundation will pull away from the ones that spend it on more tools.

Gartner article: Gartner article

2026 Citi Hildebrandt Advisory: 2026 Citi Hildebrandt Advisory