Legal technology‘s value is shifting from measuring efficiency gains to demonstrating direct contribution to revenue, risk reduction and faster decisions, said legal experts at the panel “The Growth of Legal Tech: From Support Tool to Strategic Business Driver” at the ETLegalWorld AI-Powered Legal Transformation Summit 2026.
Moderated by Nimit Kumar, Founder of Bharat.Law, the panel featured Srijit Mukherjee (General Legal Counsel, Kocho), Jyothi V K (General Counsel and Sr. Vice President, Aditya Birla Fashion) and Kunal Rajpal (Fmr Assistant General Counsel & Executive Director, Wells Fargo).
Kumar opened by questioning how many enterprises treat legal tech as a genuine business investment rather than an efficiency expense, framing the discussion around moving legal tech from a support function to measurable business outcomes.
Mukherjee described a contract excellence platform that goes beyond authoring by capturing institutional knowledge, how deals were closed, what positions were negotiated, that typically gets lost after negotiations end. This intelligence helped reduce deal-cycle time, letting the organisation recognise revenue faster. When legal tech shortens the path from agreement to execution, legal efficiency becomes directly tied to revenue acceleration.
Reducing Cost and Risk, Not Generating Revenue Directly
Rajpal noted the business case for legal AI differs for conventional enterprises versus AI-product companies: legal remains a cost centre, so its contribution comes through lowering the cost and risk of doing business—faster contract turnaround, reduced external legal spend, more efficient regulatory analysis.
For financial services, regulatory risk across jurisdictions is critical; AI can help compare regulatory environments consistently and identify structures that work across markets, allowing products to launch with greater confidence and lower exposure.
Jyothi said many general counsels introduced CLM mainly to speed contracts and improve visibility, but these often stayed “legal initiatives” with limited strategic value. With agentic AI and interoperable platforms, businesses can now connect legal workflows to larger operational journeys. When legal tech integrates with the full journey, business teams see it as a growth platform, not just lawyer-efficiency software. Keeping it confined to legal risks insufficient budget and cooperation; the next generation of legal tech must help enterprises complete business outcomes, not just legal tasks.
Generative AI and low-code tools are pushing legal departments beyond buying software toward building it internally. Mukherjee described contracting capabilities evolving from repositories to workflow-enabled, analytics-driven systems.
Jyothi highlighted an internal AI environment for summarisation, document querying, research and translation. She cautioned that merely bolting AI features onto conventional CLM is incremental; the bigger opportunity is platforms connecting information across functions so leaders see an entire operational journey—that’s where legal tech becomes strategically relevant.
Rajpal argued enterprises need room to explore legal AI use cases that aren’t yet proven, since the most valuable future applications may not fit existing categories like CLM or litigation management. “If we run on the principle that every AI tool has to deliver up to a certain efficiency, we will only be following or evaluating the models that are already there,” he said.
Innovation Still Needs to Show ROI
Jyothi agreed innovation funding matters but cautioned that CFOs will keep asking about ROI. Legal teams must show how technology drives enterprise outcomes rather than relying on abstract innovation arguments. She sees strong potential in integrating data across business functions to build organisational intelligence, less visible than a flashy AI interface, but more sustainable strategically, and easier to fund once demonstrated.
Asked what would happen if AI vanished, Mukherjee said it would mainly increase lead times for legal work. Rajpal said legal AI is still early-stage compared to infrastructure like the internet, its loss would create inefficiencies, particularly in contracting, but wouldn’t collapse most operating models. Jyothi said impact depends on adoption maturity: early-stage functions would see limited disruption, while AI-intensive enterprises that have restructured processes and staffing around it would feel far more impact. For most teams, AI remains an accelerator today, but dependency will grow as workflows are redesigned around it.
The panelists urged the legal teams to stop asking “how much time does this save legal?” and start asking what business outcome it accelerates, what risk it removes, what intelligence it creates, and what the organisation can now do that it couldn’t before. As legal functions increasingly build alongside buying, the next phase of legal-tech growth will be defined by how well technology investment connects to revenue, risk and enterprise growth, not just adoption levels.
The AI-Powered Legal Transformation Summit 2026 by ETLegalWorld was held in Bengaluru. The summit brought together general counsel, in-house legal leaders, and technology innovators, to chart the next phase of legal transformation in an AI-driven world.
