Guest Post: Ken Crutchfield Reads the Tea Leaves for Legal Tech in 2026

Forget the bold predictions. Ken Crutchfield is focusing on something more fundamental: the physics of the legal tech market.

In the wake of a banner 2025 — with Harvey hitting an $8 billion valuation, Filevine raising $400 million, and Clio’s acquisition of vLex — it is tempting to either celebrate the boom or fret about an AI bubble.

But Crutchfield takes a different approach. Rather than making predictions, he examines the macro forces — what he calls “the new physics of legal tech” — that will shape 2026 and beyond.

In his latest column for LawNext, The New Physics of Legal Tech: Infrastructure, Capital, and the Coming AI Realignment, the first of two parts, Crutchfield identifies six critical trends to watch, from the AI Industrial Revolution’s geopolitical implications to the performance of the Magnificent 7 tech giants, from mainstream AI adoption in law to mounting ROI pressure on everyone from Thomson Reuters to venture-backed startups.

“Legal innovators must focus on defensible applications that go beyond LLMs,” Crutchfield writes, warning that using foundation models is “like dancing with elephants. Don’t get so close that the elephant steps on you.”

He also previews Part 2, where he’ll examine how unauthorized practice of law (UPL) becomes the collision point “where technology, consumer behavior, ROI pressures, and professional regulation collide, and where the physics of the market are likely to drive structural change.”

Crutchfield is principal of Spring Forward Consulting and has been an executive at LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters and most recently Wolters Kluwer, where he was vice president and general manager of legal markets for Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S.

Read his full post on LawNext.