: The Year of Agents in Legal AI

Legora announced that Walter AI is joining the company. The partnership will focus on building the next generation of legal technology. Both teams share the vision of AI performing end-to-end legal work. The companies stated that 2026 is the year that vision becomes reality. They described the shift to agentic AI as the most significant transformation legal work has ever seen, similar to the arrival of the internet. The announcement drew parallels with software development. AI agents in software have progressed from autocompleting code to completing multi-day projects spanning millions of lines of code. Legal work is tracking the same curve one cycle behind. The announcement explained that agentic technology differs from chatbots. Chatbots provide answers to questions while agents receive tasks, create plans, execute them, and return results. This enables long-context review of entire matter files, end-to-end multi-step workflows, and memory-driven agents that retain client preferences. Legal AI is positioned to move from simple prompts in 2023 and multi-step workflows in 2025 to agents completing complex end-to-end work in 2026. The companies noted that this requires more than frontier models. Purpose-built platforms with matter context, approval flows, audit trails, and governance are needed for safe deployment.