Across organizations of every size, I am seeing the same operational pattern take shape. Legal teams are carrying more work, adopting more technology, and fielding increasing demands from the business, yet the underlying infrastructure has not evolved at the same pace.
The result is a readiness gap that grows quietly and gradually, often in the background of an otherwise high-functioning department. The encouraging part is that the leaders who recognize the pattern early are already finding practical ways to close it.
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Many legal departments continue to expand their responsibilities, including AI Governance, Data Privacy Programs, Enterprise Risk Management, and deal acceleration. The volume and complexity of the work have increased significantly, but the operational foundation that supports it has not always kept up. Intake still arrives informally, routing depends on who happens to see a request first, and workflows often rely on institutional memory rather than shared processes.
These gaps do not appear all at once. They accumulate. Turnaround times begin to vary without explanation. Routine work slows down because every matter feels unique. And teams that want to introduce more self-service or automation cannot do so, simply because the pathways for the work are unclear.
One global technology company we supported experienced this firsthand. Once they clarified their intake and routing, the entire dynamic of the department changed. Forecasting became more accurate, escalations decreased, and cross-functional teams finally understood what to expect from legal and how to partner with them effectively. Nothing about the work itself changed. The structure did.
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The same pattern shows up in financial visibility. Legal leaders want to plan proactively for outside counsel spend and internal resource allocation, but many still pull data from scattered systems or rely on manual tracking. Even highly capable teams find themselves in uncomfortable conversations with Finance because the numbers are difficult to defend.
When leaders take the time to bring order to the data, the shift is immediate. Several legal departments we have worked with have reduced outside counsel spend by 20 to 50 percent through value-based pricing efforts. The improvement did not come from more aggressive negotiations. It came from clarity about which matters belonged with outside firms, how the work should be scoped, and how outcomes would be measured.
This level of financial maturity is no longer optional. It is foundational to how legal departments will operate in 2026 and beyond.
Technology Only Works When the Foundation Is Steady
Every legal department is evaluating AI, workflow tools, CLM platforms, or a combination of all three. These tools hold enormous promise, but they also reveal operational weaknesses faster than anything else. If templates are inconsistent, if playbooks vary across the team, or if workflows are ad hoc and undefined, the technology will struggle, adoption will lag, and the return on investment will be limited.
The teams seeing real benefits from technology start with readiness, not with the tools themselves.
A global company we worked with deployed an internal AI assistant to answer common employee questions. It now absorbs hundreds of inquiries each month. The only reason it works is that the content behind it was accurate, structured, and regularly maintained.
Another organization, a fast-growing biotech company, took a governance-first approach. Before piloting any AI tools, they created practical usage guidelines that clarified what AI could and could not do within the department. This gave their leadership team the confidence to move forward without creating unnecessary risk.
Several contracting teams we support have also seen significant gains. Once their templates, approval paths, and escalation criteria were aligned, they began using platform-native AI features to handle low-risk agreements. Review cycles that previously took days moved to hours.
In each example, the technology succeeded because the operational groundwork was already in place.
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Legal departments do not need to move faster to prepare for 2026. They need to build a foundation that can support the pace at which the business already operates. The teams investing in that structure now will be in a far better position to adopt new tools, respond to the organization’s needs, and lead with confidence in the years ahead.
Legal departments already carry the weight of growing expectations. The advantage goes to the teams that stop treating operational readiness as a back-office project and start treating it as a leadership responsibility. When the foundation is strong, everything else, such as AI, workflows, pricing, and staffing, becomes easier to execute and easier to defend.
2026 won’t reward speed for its own sake. It will reward clarity, structure, and operational maturity.
And the departments investing in those fundamentals now will be the ones leading with confidence when the next wave of change arrives.
Stephanie Corey is the co-founder and CEO of UpLevel Ops. She also serves as the Global Chair of LINK x L Suite — a premier community of General Counsel and Legal Operations leaders united to transform the legal industry through collaboration, innovation, and strategic insight. Stephanie co-founded LINK (Legal Innovators Network), a legal ops organization exclusively for experienced in-house professionals, and previously founded the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), where she served as an executive board member. She is a recognized leader in legal operations and a frequent advisor to corporate legal departments on scaling operational excellence. Please feel free to connect with her on LinkedIn.