This is Part II of a Legal Futures series. In Part I, we have discussed how predictions about the future of law can turn out tricky, because there is never just one inevitable future.
Futures are plural, fluid, and, what’s more, we can actively participate in shaping them.
In this Part II, we will look at how to engage with futures once you stop predicting them. We will borrow heavily from strategic foresight and futures studies.
To do so, we will look at the key building blocks: signals, trends, and scenarios.
Signals
Signals are individual observable indicators that may be pointing to some phenomenon.
For example, legal AI startup Ivo just launched a collaborative platform (12 August 2026). This one event could be interpreted in a multitude of ways.
- Maybe legal AI is shifting its attention to the collaboration layer on top of lawyers using chatbots.
- It could be an AI-enabled CLM rebranding or the latest from the platform war over the legal front door.
- Or perhaps it seeks to redefine the role of legal AI from mere cognitive assistance to the orchestrating brain behind the distribution of legal work.
These predictions do not have to materialize. For example, many were talking about and investing in the metaverse, but as of today, these futures bets have not materialised.
However, a signal can tell us a lot about where energy is going, what people are thinking about, and what could potentially grow into the next big thing.
Classifying signals
Signals are raw material and as such can be sorted and clustered.
One way to do it is to assign categories to them to better understand where efforts are distributed. There are some famous frameworks to do this, such as STEEPV or PESTLE.
I personally adjusted my own tags specifically for the legal market: Regulatory, Economic, Technical, Institutional, Ethical, and Social (RETIES). I use this mostly because of the highly regulated nature of the legal tech industry and the prevalence of institutional actors, such as bar associations or courts.
For example, a firm choosing Legora or Harvey can be an Economic or Technical signal, lowering your junior lawyer intake can be an Economic or Social one, ABA releasing guidance on the use of AI tools is Institutional, Regulatory, and Social.
This is useful especially if you want to compare how fast the different layers move. If everyone is adopting one GenAI solution, but there are no Economic indicators of rising revenue, what does that mean?
Trends
Signals can also cluster into broader trends.
For example, at this point, we can confidently argue that the frontier model companies are increasingly seeking to compete at the legal AI application layer. This trend is currently taking shape and we can break it down into a number of signals, to pick a few:
- OpenAI invests in Harvey seed round (November 2022)
- Claude introduces first legal plugins, for NDA triage, contracts, and more (February 2026)
- Zach Shapiro publishes The Claude-Native Law Firm (27 February 2026)
- Claude unveils Cowork for legal (18 May 2026)
- Artificial Lawyer posts that OpenAI is planning Codex for Legal (18 May 2026)
- OpenAI hires Ironclad Jason Boehmig as a product head for the legal vertical (June 2026)
- Anthropic hires Head of Claude for Legal (6 August 2026)
This view helps us create a narrative and connect it to other phenomena. It also shows how it has been developing (from early investments and plugins to dedicated product strategies).
From this standpoint, we can also extrapolate the possible futures and formulate scenarios.
Scenarios
Scenarios are coherent narratives based on signals and their combinations. They do not just describe current trends, but build their own worlds supported by certain assumptions.
For example, here is a futures scenario that I handcrafted for a workshop at a law school: It is 2050 and there are no junior lawyer jobs available, as the junior work is now reliably performed by Generative AI and related tech tools. People are still required to obtain a law degree in order to provide legal advice.
Scenarios are not predictions and formulating them is not fortune telling. A scenario may or may not happen, but it can be useful in examining our assumptions, devising strategy for such situations, or working backwards from them.
If we zoom in on the scenario above, we can discuss some of the following questions:
- What changes would have to happen so that legal education is relevant for such a future?
- What decisions can be taken now, before it is clear what the future will look like?
- What role can a law school play in the shaping of this future?
Curious about the outcome of this discussion? Here is a report from the workshop.
Visions for 2050 and beyond
Working with scenarios is an essential part of verbalising our ideas of the future. But the best scenarios are often felt and experienced, not just read.
Lately, many legal innovators have been sharing fiction as a part of making sense of this groundbreaking transformation we’re in.
Return for the final part III to explore design fiction and artefacts in Legal Futures and how to work with others’ visions for 2050 and beyond.
Baru
