Five predictions for legal tech in 2025 with Monica Zent

The legal industry is a paradox. It has historically been one of the earliest adopters of technology advancements, and yet the industry has often struggled to maximize the potential that technology offers to innovate. This is what led to the opportunity for Monica Zent to found ZentLaw , an “alternative” legal services provider, 23 years ago. According to Monica, those opportunities still exist today, as do the struggles.

“With the legal industry’s wealth of massive legislative, statutory, litigation, compliance and contractual data sets, the opportunities to build, grow and refine sophisticated large language models (LLMs) are almost endless.”

Depending on your outlook, the legal industry faces two parallel challenges – or opportunities. It remains ripe for disruption to keep pace with the nature of business and consumer needs, while the law itself is equally in need of disruption to refine and build policy surrounding our era's rapidly evolving technological landscape. Investments in legal tech have grown significantly in the last five years, with a significant uptick in interest from the venture and startup communities. Many are attempting to address those challenges with brand-new solutions or a better mousetrap. In either case, the opportunities in legal tech for both the venture and startup communities remain strong for enterprise and consumer-facing solutions – opportunities we’ve discussed at length in previous articles throughout the past 12 months. 

As an innovator and thought leader in the legal industry, Monica has been writing and speaking about the disruption possibilities in this sector for years. A rare Silicon Valley native, Monica has entrepreneurship in her blood and launched her first side hustle as a junior high schooler. That entrepreneurial spirit continued through her 20s with the founding of multiple companies, several of which she saw through to successful exits. Her experience as a founder has spanned digital media, music and technology, but legal tech represents her deepest area of expertise. In 2002, she founded ZentLaw, one of the earliest alternative legal services providers (ALSPs). She pioneered the concept of offering tech-enabled solutions, on-demand legal resources, legal operations support, and flexible legal talent to enterprise clients.

As CEO of ZentLaw, Monica has been successfully selling into and overseeing an organization that services enterprise legal, General Counsels (GCs), and their teams, including legal operations, for 23 years. Her client list features the world’s most recognizable brands and leaders in technology, electronics, digital media, entertainment, crypto, banking, energy, healthcare, apparel, sports, and many more. She has also worked closely with C-suite executives and has been tapped as an innovation strategist for some of the largest law firms and enterprise legal functions. The bottom line is that Monica is connected to a connector.

Our shared affinity for the legal tech space created an immediate connection, and with a new calendar year on the horizon, I thought it was a good time to sit down with Monica to get her expert outlook on what’s to come. Let’s dive into her top five predictions and trends for enterprise legal tech in 2025.

1. Prompt engineering will take a backseat to Sophisticated LLMs

Generative AI as applied to the performance of certain aspects of legal work garnered significant interest this year and we expect that to continue into the next year with heightened interest. What will change is the market’s openness to using Generative AI in legal work and how we think about AI. This year was met with some trepidation from the enterprise legal industry, especially those in regulated sectors, particularly with respect to confidentiality and security concerns. We heard from many Chief Legal Officers (CLO) and GCs this year that there is a desire to use AI but confusion about where and how it would best be used, along with concerns from their CISOs around security. Nevertheless, many CLOs issued mandates to their teams to determine how and where they could leverage AI because many enterprise CEOs were issuing the same mandates. Some of the use cases around AI in the corporate legal setting were not as well-defined and many users in the industry were overwhelmed with AI hype yet excited about the possibilities. 

This past year, where specific AI tools fell flat, there were heavy dependencies on prompt engineering or use cases that didn’t materialize. The majority of the market has not exhibited it has the time or inclination to learn prompt engineering to yield the meaningful AI output they’re seeking. The future state of AI solutions will need to rely more on agents working behind the scenes carrying out the prompt engineering for the user, providing the end user with a more natural experience. Next year, we’ll see more well-defined use cases emerge for how AI can be used in the performance of legal work and more sophisticated LLMs that are more intuitive for the user. We’ll also see opportunities for more bespoke AI solutions for the enterprise to preempt the security considerations and drive more meaningful output.  

2. GCs and CLOs need legal tech to become more secure

Information security remains a top priority for the enterprise setting and intersects deeply with legal functions surrounding regulatory compliance, contractual compliance, and business needs for confidentiality, data security, and intellectual property protection. Cybersecurity threats remain top of mind for CLOs and GCs, especially when we consider threat actors utilizing gen-AI to carry out more elaborate schemes. Corporate legal departments and the law firms that serve them are at increasing risk of cyber threats, from phishing and ransomware to deep fakes and cloud intrusions. In addition, as governmental regulators and consumer plaintiffs’ counsel continue to hold corporate executives responsible for data leaks and breaches involving personal information, solutions that deliver upon secure information governance will be key. The landscape for corporate teams and the law firms that advise them is growing increasingly complex as it pertains to how to respond to the inevitable cybersecurity threats. 

There are numerous opportunities for startups to deliver legal tech solutions that ensure greater security around key functions within an organization from identity and user validation to cybersecurity training for employees to threat detection and incident response management and more. Cyberthreats can result in significant liability to a company across legal, financial and regulatory functions. legal tech tools that can deliver upon critical security functions and facilitate corporate security best practices will be game-changers. 

3. Litigation will modernize around predictive analytics

Litigation tech garnered only a small portion of the funding this year (and less in years prior) yet litigation is one of the areas of greatest spend for organizations, calling for extensive resources, budgeting and planning. Fundamentally, the role of lawyers often involves evaluating a set of facts against the law and advising the client on a course of action or a range of potential outcomes or courses of action. Regardless of the size of the organization, this is a key facet of lawyering. That said, solid technology that will automate that process and permit the lawyer to provide this guidance with greater speed and accuracy is a good thing and something the market will need. Given the massive data sets needed for meaningful predictive analytics and the accessibility of those data sets now more than ever, this area is ripe for greater Gen-AI disruption.

There are a multitude of benefits to be derived from predictive analytics leveraging AI, such as tapping into insights previously inaccessible or too time-consuming to gather (e.g., judicial behavior) and facilitating the creation of models to drive better intake and early case workup based on findings. Organizations that leverage more sophisticated predictive analytics are poised to benefit from enhanced abilities to evaluate, strategize, respond to, and manage litigation when it arises.

4. There is a big opportunity for enterprises that serve SMBs

As small business consumers become increasingly sophisticated and tech-first in their exploration of legal support and as the regulatory environment in which they operate grows more complex, there is a significant opportunity for enterprises that serve the SMB market to solve these challenges with end-users facing legal tech. For instance, many small business customers lack expertise in offering and operating compliant employee benefits programs. While payroll providers may offer some of these services, the compliance obligations fall to the SMBs. These SMBs can drown in compliance obligations they don’t fully understand and suffer fines and penalties. AI-driven tools that are easy to use and step the user through what they need to do to ensure compliance or help them identify and engage with an attorney to assist them are in high demand. Enterprise organizations that serve SMB and mid-market customers can seize an opportunity to deliver downstream, easy-to-use, AI-driven legal tech solutions to address what has been, to date, an underserved need.

5. Automation will never go out of style

There remain numerous tasks within enterprise legal settings, whether within a corporate legal department or large law firms, that are ripe for automation and good, old-fashioned SaaS solutions. From compliance, to discovery, to contracts management to legal operations, there are numerous opportunities to automate tasks. This automation will drive increased efficiencies and savings. With the rise of legal operations, corporate legal teams are demanding tools to automate repeat tasks or tasks that can be facilitated with the use of AI. Large law firms are also pressed to find solutions for how to do more with less and deliver these savings to their clients. Certain tasks such as tracking contract renewals, or key milestones, docketing and intellectual property portfolio management, bill review, post-data security breach responses, managing corporate affiliates, privacy compliance and regulatory compliance management are only a handful of examples of the use cases that can be automated or refined with more sophisticated, easy-to-use, AI-enabled tools. Some of the incumbents on the market that have been used in these areas are seen now as more clunky solutions that are less intuitive and slow to innovate. 

This creates an opportunity for startups to bring easy-to-use, targeted solutions to these challenges or to automate where prior automation was not attempted. The increasing reliance of corporate legal teams on legal operations professionals to identify, refine and process-map out the desirable future state for inefficient existing workflows opens the door to layer on the right technology to facilitate reaching that desirable future state.

Legal tech for the world

Whether it’s a Fortune 50 company, a global law firm or a small business, there remain opportunities to streamline legal work, perform critical functions and ensure compliance and risk are well-managed through use of the right tools. More sophisticated, end-user friendly LLMs, solutions focused on closing critical security gaps, use of AI-powered predictive analytics, tools for SMB or mid-market customers, and automation of various work streams in the enterprise will drive greater efficiency and cost savings. 

“Ultimately, Enterprise legal tech is about doing more with less, moving lawyers and other legal professionals up the value chain and mitigating compliance, contractual and security risks in the process,” says Zent. “The opportunities for legal tech disruption remain very strong in 2025 for those pursuing startups and investments in these areas.”