Each January, The National Law Review surveys a cross-section of the legal profession — practitioners, academics, judges, and legal technology leaders — to forecast how AI will reshape the field in the year ahead. The 2026 edition is the most expansive yet, featuring predictions from 85 voices including Darrow's Chief Revenue Officer Mathew Keshav Lewis, and captures a profession at a genuine inflection point.
The survey opens with a set of baseline questions that reveal where expert consensus currently sits. On artificial general intelligence: 77.4% of respondents do not expect AGI to be achieved in 2026. On the replacement of entry-level lawyers: 58.3% say it is unlikely within five years, though 20.2% believe it is likely. Perhaps most striking is the finding on legal education: 84% of respondents identified significant gaps or outright inadequacy in how U.S. law schools are preparing students for AI-enabled practice. The profession is moving faster than its own pipeline.
The individual predictions span litigation, legal operations, transactions, and education, but several themes recur across contributors. The most prominent is the shift from AI as a productivity tool to AI as operational infrastructure — and the governance discipline that shift demands. Respondents broadly agree that 2026 will reward legal teams that build auditable, validated workflows over those that simply accumulate more tools.
Editor-in-Chief Oliver Roberts contributes four predictions of his own. The most immediately practical is a call for courts to adopt a mandatory Hyperlink Rule — requiring every cited judicial opinion, statute, or regulation in a filing to be hyperlinked to a verified legal database — as a front-end control against AI-hallucinated authorities. With more than 729 documented instances of fabricated citations in court filings, Roberts argues that existing sanctions have proven an insufficient deterrent, and that a self-executing verification requirement at the point of filing is a more effective solution. He also predicts that AI-related job displacement will push Universal Basic Income into mainstream political debate by late 2026, and that escalating U.S.-China tensions over Taiwan will accelerate federal preemption of state AI laws, as Congress begins to treat AI regulation as a national security issue rather than a consumer protection one.
Across the broader set of predictions, contributors anticipate tightening sanctions for AI-generated hallucinations in court filings, the first experiments with quantum computing in legal technology, and a growing divide between firms that can demonstrate disciplined AI governance and those that cannot. The tension between federal and state AI regulation is expected to intensify throughout the year.
Darrow's Mathew Keshav Lewis contributes to the piece as one of the legal technology sector's voices, reflecting Darrow's position monitoring how legal exposure forms across industries and regulatory environments before it reaches the courts. For firms and legal departments trying to orient themselves in a fast-moving landscape, the full roundup serves as one of the most comprehensive annual snapshots available of where the legal AI field is headed — and where it still has significant ground to cover.
