At the same time, they report the strongest tilt towards short-term planning, the heaviest prioritisation of technology over workforce development, and the most polarised shift in employee sentiment of any sector.
The data therefore suggests a profession that is coping well with immediate pressures while simultaneously accumulating long-term risk. AI is accelerating existing fault lines in workforce design, particularly around early-career development and leadership pipelines. Confidence remains high, but it is increasingly decoupled from sustainable capability-building.
What follows is an overview of the key insights relevant to the legal sector.
1. Structural short-termism as a defining feature
The Future @ Work 2026 report highlights short-term thinking as common to most organisations, but it is particularly acute among those operating in the legal sector, making this one of the most short-termist ones. This reflects the influence of annual revenue cycles, partner profit distribution, and the reactive nature of client-facing advisory work, where immediate responsiveness is often prioritised over longer-term planning.
In this context, the partnership model plays a central role in reinforcing these dynamics: incentives are closely aligned with near-term financial performance, while the returns on investment in leadership capability, workforce redesign, and skills development are longer term and more diffuse. As a result, strategic decision-making tends to favour short-term optimisation, even where the need for deeper organisational change is well understood.
The data underlines how entrenched this orientation has become. A striking 84% of legal respondents prioritise or lean towards short-term outcomes, with 24% deliberately prioritising short-term results and a further 60% attempting balance while still leaning short-term, and only 5% leaning towards or prioritising long-term outcomes. Political and economic pressures further compress planning horizons, with 86% citing political developments and 59% economic conditions as reinforcing short-term thinking.
2. Preparedness, pace of change, and workforce stability
Despite pronounced short-termism, however, legal services report consistently high levels of preparedness across all major forces shaping the future of work. Confidence is strongest around geopolitics and regulation (90%) and workforce demographics (90%), followed closely by AI and technology (88%) and sustainability (82%). Across these domains, a large majority also describe the pace of change as manageable, reinforcing a sense of sectoral stability and control.
This confidence is reflected in expectations around workforce size. Most legal respondents anticipate relative stability, with 65% expecting a slight increase in headcount and none anticipating significant growth or contraction. In contrast to sectors facing more disruptive restructuring, legal services continue to see incremental adjustment rather than radical workforce reshaping as the dominant trajectory.
The data therefore draws attention to a central paradox. The legal sector appears steady, confident, and resilient in the face of ongoing disruption. Yet, the report also indicates that, across sectors, the same structures and incentives that underpin this confidence are also allowing longer-term capability pressures to accumulate. Despite headline confidence, it is important to underline how, without deliberate intervention, stability risks becoming stagnation rather than a platform for sustainable adaptation.
3. Regulatory and geopolitical context as a buffer
Geopolitical and regulatory instability plays a distinctive role in shaping the legal sector’s experience of change. Unlike many other industries, uncertainty often generates demand for legal services, positioning law firms as both advisers to, and beneficiaries of, volatile operating environments. This dynamic helps insulate the sector from some of the more direct external shocks felt elsewhere.
The data reflects this buffering effect. A majority of legal respondents (59%) report that geopolitical and economic instability has only a minimal impact on their organisation. None report experiencing no impact at all, yet just 2% describe the effects as significant. Compared with other sectors, legal services therefore perceive themselves as relatively protected from the immediate operational consequences of global disruption.
However, this resilience has limits. While regulatory complexity and geopolitical flux support short-term confidence and demand, they do little to address the internal workforce and capability pressures identified elsewhere in the data. There is a risk that external insulation masks deeper structural challenges around planning horizons, investment balance, and workforce sustainability.
4. AI adoption accelerates
AI emerges in the legal sector as a powerful catalyst for change, intensifying existing structural pressures rather than creating wholly new ones. As seen earlier, law firms report the second highest level of perceived preparedness for AI and technology in the dataset, trailing only the tech sector. This confidence reflects both early adoption and growing familiarity, but it also masks deeper questions about how AI is reshaping work beneath the surface.
Adoption is already translating into tangible changes in how legal work is done, particularly in tasks traditionally performed by junior lawyers and paralegals. Tools such as Harvey and Legora are accelerating research, drafting, and document review, prompting firms to reassess leverage models and the size and shape of their workforce. The dominant expectation is therefore one of transformation rather than contraction, with 63% anticipating that between 6% and 15% of roles will be reshaped.
It is also comforting to note that concerns about large-scale job loss remain limited. Nearly three quarters (72%) of legal respondents expect only a small number of roles to be eliminated, a further 19% expect no job losses at all, and just 3% anticipate elimination affecting more than 16% of jobs. At the same time, 92% expect some degree of job creation, albeit concentrated in specialist roles.
These insights therefore position AI as a structural challenge for the profession, requiring deliberate workforce redesign and skills planning, rather than as an existential employment threat.
5. Skills Demand Reflects the Profession’s Relational Core
Expectations around skills demand in the legal sector underscore the enduring importance of its relational and advisory core. While rising demand for human-centred skills appears across the whole report, it is most pronounced in legal services, where professional value continues to rest on judgment, trust, ethical reasoning, and client counsel rather than purely technical execution.
The data strongly corroborates this conclusion. An overwhelming 85% of legal respondents expect a greater need for soft skills, with 15% anticipating a much greater need and a further 70% expecting a slight increase. By contrast, only 3% foresee an increased need for technical skills, and none anticipate a much greater need in this area. This reflects a shared view that, even as AI reshapes tasks and workflows, core advisory capabilities remain resistant to automation.
This skills profile sits in growing tension with the sector’s investment patterns. As technology investment accelerates and workforce development remains marginal, firms risk under-resourcing the very capabilities they recognise as central to future performance. Closing this gap will be critical if legal organisations are to translate technological change into sustained professional value rather than short-term efficiency gains.
6. Investment choices reinforce capability gaps
The Future @ Work 2026 highlights a clear imbalance in the legal sector’s investment intentions: firms are more likely than any other sector to prioritise technology investment, while workforce development remains firmly marginal. This pattern reflects short-term commercial incentives and billing pressures, but it also compounds the capability risks created by AI-driven role change.
The data is striking. An overwhelming 91% of legal respondents expect to invest more in technology than in workforce development, and none anticipate prioritising workforce development over technology at all. Nearly all firms (94%) describe workforce development as only a minimal or moderate strategic priority, while just 6% view it as significant or very high. This places the legal sector at the extreme end of a wider trend, where only around 5% of organisations across all sectors prioritise workforce development over technology.
This investment profile sits uneasily alongside widespread recognition that human-centred capabilities are critical to extracting value from AI. As routine legal tasks are automated or accelerated, skills such as judgment, client management, supervision, and ethical decision-making become more important rather than less. Yet, without sustained investment in these areas, firms risk widening the gap between technological capability and organisational readiness.
7. ESG and DEI Are Embedded, but Impact on Sentiment Is Uneven
Legal services emerge as one of the strongest sectors in embedding ESG and DEI into formal decision-making. Measurement is widespread, commitments are highly visible, and ESG and DEI considerations are routinely integrated into governance and operational processes. This places the sector ahead of much of the wider dataset in terms of institutional maturity.
The data reflects this strength clearly. A large majority of legal organisations, 86%, measure both ESG and DEI, with a further 12% measuring one or the other. In total, 94% report embedding ESG and DEI into decision-making processes, compared with 78% across all sectors. Attraction and retention are the most commonly cited drivers for this focus, highlighting the role of ESG and DEI as tools for competitiveness as well as values.
However, this maturity does not automatically translate into a uniformly positive workforce experience. High workloads, billing pressure, and structural short-termism continue to shape day-to-day realities in ways that ESG and DEI frameworks alone cannot resolve. The data suggests a sector that has invested heavily in process and principle, while still grappling with deeper structural pressures that affect sentiment and sustainability.
8. Employee Sentiment Reveals Polarisation
Employee sentiment in the legal sector is more polarised than in any other. While a significant proportion of legal organisations report improvements in workforce sentiment, the sector also records the strongest negative sentiment shift overall. This divergence points to uneven experiences within firms rather than a single, shared trajectory.
The data illustrates this split clearly. Just over half (51%) of legal respondents report a negative shift in employee sentiment, the highest proportion of any sector, while 47% report a positive shift, below the cross-sector average. Only a very small minority, 2%, report no change at all. These patterns suggest that gains in some teams or functions are being offset by heightened pressure elsewhere.
This polarisation aligns closely with wider findings in the report on the drivers of negative sentiment. Across sectors, a lack of strategic clarity is the most commonly cited cause of declining morale, and this appears particularly acute in legal services. High levels of organisational confidence increasingly coexist with internal strain, shaped by workload intensity, rapid change, and limited visibility of long-term direction.