MPL Legal Tech Advisors: The Legal AI Brief

Thursday, 22nd January 2026 - 20th Edition​​​​

This Week's Theme

A growing number of public statements and forecasts suggest that 2026 will be the year AI starts displacing lawyers.

Despite how often this is repeated, the evidence does not support it. Across labour market research, productivity studies, and legal industry reports, there is no signal pointing to sudden or massive lawyer displacement in the near term.

What is happening is faster adoption driven by fear. Firms are moving more quickly than their operating models can absorb, skipping the groundwork required to make the technology useful, safe, and measurable.

Insight of the Week

The strongest effect of the “AI will replace lawyers” narrative is reckless and rushed adoption.

When firms believe models will soon become powerful enough to solve structural problems on their own, foundational work gets postponed. Process clarity, data ownership, review boundaries, and responsibility mapping are treated as temporary obstacles rather than prerequisites.

This has two consequences.

First, firms never fully learn how these systems behave inside real legal workflows. They do not go through the learning curve required to understand failure modes, supervision cost, and where judgment actually enters the system.

Second, attention shifts away from how AI can be used today, in concrete and bounded ways, toward speculative future capability. The technology is already powerful enough to create value now, but only for firms willing to engage with its limits instead of waiting for them to disappear.

Legal AI in Action

🎬 What Smart AI Adoption Looks Like in Law

What strategic, deliberate "laggards" get right

🎬 Inside a Truly AI-First Law Firm

A regulated, real-life case study of Garfield AI

📰 New Article Published!

Where legal AI confidence is outpacing the evidence in 2026​

https://legalversemedia.com/the-predictions-for-legal-ai-in-2026-limits-risk-and-misplaced-assumptions/ In 2026, the main risk is planning around assumptions that are already failing under real use.

Red Flag of the Week

Much of the displacement narrative is sustained by incentives rather than evidence.

A significant portion of Fortune 500 companies is financially entangled in the circular financing of the AI ecosystem. Continued investment depends on sustained momentum, and sustained momentum depends on a future framed as inevitable and urgent.

Talking to countless of lawyers in my work, two claims are repeated side by side:

1. This is the most powerful technology we have seen so far, with real potential to change how legal work is delivered.

2. This technology is massively overhyped.

Both are true, and they apply to different dimensions.

What is powerful is the ability to support legal work, especially in how information is retrieved, summarized, and structured across systems. The actual potential is in redefining how legal work is delivered.

What is overhyped is the scope of problems it can solve on its own, and the idea that implementation effort will soon disappear. The belief that groundwork is optional, or that waiting leads to advantage, is where firms quietly lose time.

What Law Firm Decision Makers are Saying

Lawyers understand that the technology is useful, but they were led to believe it would require less structure than it actually does.

Firms expected the model to compensate for unclear processes and fragmented data. When that did not happen, confidence dropped, and learning stalled.

The problem in itself is not problematic. The more dangerous part is the assumption that understanding how these systems work could be neglected.

Looking Ahead

🎙 This Saturday at 2pm CET!

This week’s guest on Rok’s Legal AI Conversations is Jean Gan, regional senior legal counsel covering South and Southeast Asia, founder of Global Legal AI, and founder of AIgnite Women.

We talk about how jurisdictional context changes what good AI use looks like in legal work, why Western-trained models create practical risk in cross-border contracts, and what responsible use requires in practice. We also discuss why she built AI Ignite Women and the specific bias and online harms it focuses on addressing through governance, education, and mentorship.

Jurisdiction, bias, and legal AI

Each edition of Legal AI Brief brings responsible lessons from firms using AI safely.