Legal Market to Hit $1.2 Trillion By 2028 – Good News For Legal Tech

New research has found that the global legal market will be worth $1,196 billion by 2028, and that’s not just good news for lawyers, but is good for legal tech companies as well.

The research, by Grand View, said that the global legal services market size was valued at $849 billion in 2020, but with a compound annual growth rate of 4.4% from 2021 to 2028, it would smash through the trillion dollar level.

The report attributes the growing use of legal tech as one of the key drivers for this expansion, however, this is maybe putting the cart before the horse. The legal market is growing, at least from Artificial Lawyer’s perspective, because:

  • Every developed nation on the planet is enacting more laws and regulations, making the legal and compliance burden on businesses and individuals ever greater, (whether we like it or not….)
  • And to that point, the world as a whole is advancing steadily onwards. Undeveloped or less-developed nations are becoming developed and so become more legalistic and bureaucratic….and so they need more lawyers.
  • There are also more and more multinational regulatory entities and trade organisations that have a real impact on people’s lives, from the EU with its obsessive lawmaking, to regional trade groups that have extensive legal agreements holding them together.
  • The world’s population is also rising and global economic growth trundles ever onwards – it’s a simple fact, but, more people and more commerce = more legal needs.

Legal tech is then fitting into this growth of demand, helping to handle repetitive processes and very data-heavy work, from legal research, to doc automation, to sales contract management. Although, it’s worth adding that despite all of this growth, access to justice for individuals remains weak in most nations and the un-met need for legal services is likely vast in scale, even if we don’t have exact figures for it.

Overall, and despite the huge A2J deficit, what we have is a bigger legal market that increases the probability that there will be more demand for legal tech, not just in the larger markets like the US and UK, but across every market.

One last thought, the research mentions the importance of AI (AKA NLP) tools in the legal world. If these are limiting growth, or reducing the number of lawyers on the planet, it hasn’t been seen yet.

Note: from past experience of generalist research companies they are usually good at the top line market size figures (as this data comes from various countries’ own publicly available economic information portals), but sometimes the more granular market breakdowns and charts are not always as accurate. Any road, if you fancy getting hold of this particular pay-walled report it can be found here.

1 Comment

  1. Congratulations an another insightful Article
    I have for some time now been researching the history and future of the access to justice deficit in three common law jurisdictions. In descending order of size of
    these are the US, England and Wales and Australia. You are absolutely right to suggest that globally the unmet A2J need is uncertain but likely to be vast.
    I would be glad to hear more from Artificial Lawyer on these topics and equally gIad to hear from others of your readers sharing these research/market interests.

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