All change for litigation technology?

• Highlights emerging litigation technology trends to support lawyers from the outset of a case and considers trends that are likely to continue.
• Considers how dedicated litigation technology will play a role in adapting to lawyers’ evolving needs.
• Explores the role of generative AI on the litigation technology landscape and offers practical considerations for lawyers.

Over the last year, the landscape for litigation and dispute resolution technology, driven by generative AI (GenAI), has evolved at a rapid pace. Law firms have faced rising case data volumes and growing overall caseloads, as well as increased pressure to manage litigation costs. As 2025 promises more of the same, lawyers need to innovate to maintain their profitability and competitive edge.

Emerging trends

Litigation lawyers are well-versed in using technology to manage specific stages of a dispute. For example, they have used tools during e-disclosure or trial that support electronic bundling, electronic presentation of evidence, and management of trial transcripts for years. But what about other stages of a case? To manage the ongoing increase in data volumes, case complexity, and caseloads, many law firms are now exploring cloud-based technology platforms that support the management of disputes from the outset by centralising case preparation tools and processes, allowing lawyers to work together from receipt of a client’s initial instructions.

These platforms enable lawyers to collaborate in a single space to review, mark up, and annotate documents, prepare the case chronology, and importantly, link chronology events to underlying documentary evidence. Some of these platforms have the added benefit of building e-bundles to accompany instructions to counsel or for interim procedural hearings, eliminating the need to export documents out of one platform and import them into another tool which only addresses e-bundling. These platforms may also provide secure ways for the mutual sharing of documents and information about the progress of a case with clients and other stakeholders via dedicated portals. Integration with other technologies, like a firm’s document management system or an e-disclosure platform, makes these platforms even more powerful, bringing together the technology ecosystem to manage a case.

The benefits to lawyers of using such a platform include helping them to get to the bottom of pertinent facts more quickly, identify gaps, and support the building of a robust case strategy. This helps meet client demands for greater value because their lawyers can be more efficient, they can streamline processes and foster best practices. In addition, the ability to manage cases in one platform allows firms to consolidate their tech stack, reducing the cost and security risk of maintaining multiple technologies.

In the US, these case preparation and management platforms are routinely used to support document review, chronology management, and witness evidence preparation. Recent research shows that more than two-thirds of US law firms use a dedicated platform to help disputes teams centrally manage all information and workflows. In England and Wales, conversely, these platforms have only recently started to gain traction over the last couple of years.

Adapting technology

Law firms on this side of the pond are increasingly turning to dedicated litigation technology from the outset of a case. In 2025, these platforms are likely to become even more widely adopted, not least due to clients demanding more value for their legal spend. Using this technology from the start provides lawyers with the tools to manage their cases more efficiently, to help them balance profitability with client satisfaction.

A unique challenge faced by litigation lawyers is the need to adapt to frequent changes to procedural rules. This means that, as law firms explore new legal tech options to manage their cases, they must prioritise agnostic tools to minimise the work required to keep them up to date due to future rule changes.

Litigation lawyers continue to grapple with managing increasing volumes of case data, alongside an influx of information from diverse data sources and types. To effectively handle these complexities, the technology must be scalable while adapting to a range of data sources and types.

Using GenAI in litigation

GenAI is pushing the boundaries of technology dedicated to managing litigation caseloads even further. While e-disclosure and legal research platforms have led the charge, the past year has seen a record number of tools incorporating GenAI into technology that lawyers are already using, empowering greater understanding and adoption of GenAI throughout the case preparation process. This will continue in 2025 as lawyers become more comfortable with GenAI, and look to use it in other areas of case preparation. For example, GenAI within case preparation platforms assists with document summarisation and extracting entities like dates, events, people and organisations. This supports faster initial document review and building the chronology from the start.

We are also beginning to see the emergence of other tools dedicated to litigation that leverage GenAI, further expanding the potential to streamline various aspects of litigation procedure. For example, one of the most frequently asked questions from clients is what their chances are of winning a case. There are tools available which claim to provide data-driven insights to predict the behaviour of judges, lawyers, and parties, to help understand the likelihood of a case succeeding at trial. However, some of these tools do little more than identifying the outcome in a written judgment, rather than predicting the outcome of future decisions. In the next year, they will likely become more refined; for instance, by accessing broader datasets beyond public court records, they could help predict case outcomes and guide strategic decision-making, but this is yet to be seen.

Drafting pleadings is another area in which GenAI can support litigation lawyers. Preparing pleadings is one of the most time-consuming tasks. Although GenAI is now widely used for general document drafting, the specific nuances of drafting pleadings in litigation mean that there are currently only a handful of tools that claim to offer help with this. Litigation technology providers are expected to focus on this over the coming year, given the significant time-saving benefit it could offer lawyers.

When it comes to gathering and reviewing evidence, one of the most substantial ways in which GenAI will soon be able to support this is by highlighting potential inconsistencies: for example ‘X said Y in their witness statement, but document A indicates that Y is not true’. This will help lawyers to identify what needs further analysis, and what questions to ask by suggesting ‘lines of enquiry’, to ensure their client’s evidence is robust. These tools can also help with finding weaknesses in the opposing party’s evidence. In addition, sentiment analysis tools enable litigation teams to quickly identify and understand the opinions, emotions, and attitudes expressed in documents like emails and instant messages. This will offer lawyers a deeper understanding of the intention and motivation behind communications between the parties, to support further enquiries that need to be made.

With regard to deciding the outcome of cases using GenAI, the jury is still out. While online platforms such as eBay routinely use AI to help resolve disputes between sellers and buyers, it is difficult to see a scenario where sophisticated commercial parties would outsource the decision-making of their complex and high-value litigation to a GenAI tool.

Having said that, there may be a role for GenAI in supporting the resolution of disputes, for instance in mediation. International law firm Taylor Wessing recently used its own GenAI tool to produce documents based on a fictional case study where the parties had agreed to mediate. The material produced, which included a mediation statement, an opening statement, and an initial strategy document which highlighted some of the strengths and weaknesses of the case ‘served as a helpful first draft’ for a lawyer to further develop. It will be interesting to see how GenAI tools evolve to support the resolution of disputes outside the courtroom, particularly given the recent changes to the Civil Procedure Rules that now require parties to promote or use alternative dispute resolution.

Practical considerations

Specific risks associated with using GenAI tools, including hallucinations and bias, as well as privacy and security concerns, are now widely understood. Proper prompt creation is essential in ensuring that these tools support the range of litigation tasks as accurately as possible. It is also important to remember that despite the nomenclature of ‘artificial intelligence’, these tools cannot be used for intelligent reasoning. ‘Trust but verify’ is a guiding principle for using this technology. In an industry that prides itself on precision and accuracy, lawyers must thoughtfully consider which tasks are best suited for GenAI, and remain diligent in reviewing and validating outputs.

As litigation technology continues to evolve and become more reliable, the administrative burden of lower value tasks will reduce, allowing lawyers to focus on higher value work. What is the effect of this for clients? With more than two-thirds of corporate legal teams considering that AI should be applied to their legal work, they will undoubtedly want these efficiency gains to be passed onto them through a reduction in fees.

Changes to the litigation technology landscape over the coming months and years could result in a paradigm shift in how law firms provide litigation services. They will need to consider how to implement these tools and monetise them to maintain their profitability. According to a recent report by PwC, 80% of the top 100 firms believe that at least 6% of existing chargeable work could be automated, while one-third believes that at least 16% of existing chargeable work could be automated. On this end of the scale, this would result in ‘unprecedented’ disruption. While we may be at the foothills of the ‘diffusion of innovation’ curve, teams that pioneer and embrace these technologies will be more nimble and able to adapt to the unexpected, giving them an advantage in the coming year and beyond.