Earlier this year, we highlighted 10 startups to watch.
Why? Because, we argued, Canada’s legaltech ecosystem is entering a decisive new phase, with 2026 shaping up to be the year when legal technology moves from promise to practice, with startups demonstrating real adoption, revenue, and impact.
Turns out we were right.
Legal technology platforms powered by artificial intelligence are contributing to productivity and efficiency gains in the sector, concludes a recent report from Gartner.
Specialized Legal AI Platforms are “delivering significant productivity and efficiency gains in important legal workflows,” the company reports, which is expected to spur a marked rise in legaltech budgets over the next couple of years.
“Early evidence suggests multi-agent legal applications offer gains in productivity, reduced reliance on external counsel, and improvements in compliance,” remarked Weston Wicks, a senior analyst with Gartner, admitting that outcomes “vary depending on implementation and organizational context.”
“The rapid growth of multi-agent legal applications is evident in both rising investment and the increasing number of available tools in the market,” he says.
These applications “are designed to accelerate routine workflows, extract key insights, and help to orchestrate complex legal processes, ” according to Wicks. This can free up lawyers’ time “to focus on providing strategic advice, risk management, and high-value client service.”
“If implemented effectively, multi agent legal applications offer a light at the end of the tunnel for burned-out legal teams facing persistent disruption and an ever more complex and dynamic legal, compliance and risk landscape,” Wicks suggests.
In the “Innovation Insight: Legal AI Platforms” report, Gartner analysts identified six beneficial capabilities:
- Accelerated legal research through natural‑language queries
- Faster case preparation and litigation support by automating document analysis
- Automated contract review and redlining
- Comprehensive contract analysis and metadata extraction
- accelerated M&A due diligence by categorizing and assessing large volumes of contracts and filings
- End‑to‑end agentic workflow orchestration that automates multistep legal processes
By 2029, Gartner forecasts that “approximately 50% of contract reviews will be delegated to self-service systems that escalate only one in 10 for human review.”
And, in the same timeframe, “we predict that 60% of legal departments will use AI-driven intake systems that capture all requests and answer one-half of those without human intervention,” says Wicks.