Legal operations trends for 2025 & how to stay ahead

Legal operations is having its moment.

Once viewed as a behind-the-scenes function, it's now a strategic force at the heart of modern business. As companies scale, legal ops is no longer just about cost control and process management, it’s about building smarter systems, streamlining collaboration, and unlocking legal’s potential to drive real business value.

In this article, we unpack the eight key trends shaping the evolution of legal operations in 2025 — and what they mean for teams ready to lead the change.

8 trends shaping legal operations in 2025

1. The rise of the legal engineer

Modern legal ops teams need more than legal knowledge alone – they need people who can build systems. Legal engineers fit that gap, combining process design and tech fluency with a deep understanding of the law. In 2025, they’re the ones designing the workflows, building automation, and bridging the gap between legal and the wider business.

Gartner predicted that by 2024, 20 per cent of in-house lawyers would be replaced or augmented by technologists. It's 2025 and that trend is now reality.

Legal engineers are stepping into and owning tasks from intake design to AI implementation. They’re also shaping how legal work gets measured, using data to improve speed, consistency, and outcomes.

Forward-thinking GCs understand that legal engineers are pivotal to scaling legal’s impact.

For example, Tom Hambrett, Revolut’s Group General Counsel, scaled Revolut’s legal function from a one-person department into a team that successfully supports the entire $45 billion business. How? “We didn’t just try to hire more people. We asked: how can we build a legal function that scales like the rest of the business?".

In 2025, legal engineers are the ones making that scale possible.

2. AI goes agentic

AI has become a reliable co-pilot for legal teams. But in 2025, it's beginning to take on a more active role.

Legal ops leaders are exploring agentic AI – autonomous tools that act without requiring human input. These agents can review documents, flag risks, propose redlines, and escalate decisions based on internal rules and playbooks.

“A copilot might read your contract and recommend stuff for you to do with it. Agree with this clause interpretation, action this reminder date, flag this deviation from your standard playbook, and so on”, explains Richard Mabey, Juro CEO and co-founder. “An agent might read your contract, know all the context in the same way a copilot does – and instead of recommending actions, it takes them. It just does it.”

It’s early days, but the direction is clear. Tools like AutoGPT and Flank’s legal agents hint at a future where contract workflows run with minimal human input. (You can dive deeper into Flank’s approach in our interview with Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer Jake Jones.)

Agentic AI certainly looks promising. However, achieving this potential won’t be simple. These agents need structured playbooks, clean data, and tight internal logic. Without that, they risk introducing more problems than they solve. As one panellist commented at InsidePractice’s Legal AI conference, building agentic systems is “not necessarily for the weak.”

These technical demands mean most legal teams are yet to embrace agentic AI. In fact, 54 per cent of in-house lawyers told us they have limited or no understanding of what agentic AI even is.

That’s exactly why early adopters have the chance to pull ahead. Teams willing to engage early and start experimenting could gain a significant competitive edge.

3. The death of the billable hour

The billable hour isn’t dead just yet, but it is certainly falling in favour. As automation reshapes legal workflows, GCs are rethinking what they actually need from outside counsel. And it’s not six-minute billing increments.

Instead, legal leaders are prioritizing outcomes: contracts closed, risks mitigated, time-to-sign. They expect law firms to align with these goals – but many aren’t.

In Juro’s State of In-House 2025 survey, 45 per cent of in-house lawyers rated Big Law’s value for money as “poor” or “terrible.” Rising fees, slow turnaround times, and vague deliverables are all pushing legal teams to take more work in-house or demand fixed-fee arrangements.

The frustration isn’t just about price – it’s about how that price is justified. As AI streamlines work that once took weeks, the traditional logic behind the billable hour starts to break down.

“I heard a story at Legal Week about a company who instructed a law firm to review 30,000 contracts as part of a due diligence exercise. They were quoted six months and $6M.”, says Richard Mabey, Juro CEO and co-founder. “First-generation legal AI – old-fashioned machine learning and OCR – could cut that down to 12 weeks. Current-generation legal AI, powered by LLMs, can do it in 2.5 days.”

AI is transforming legal operations jobs. But if those efficiency gains don’t benefit the client, the model stops making sense. That’s why legal ops teams are pushing for something better in 2025: pricing that reflects outcomes, not inputs – and rewards speed, not time.

4. Leaning down the tech stack

Legal teams are done with bloated tech stacks. After years of layering solutions on top of one another, 2025 is the year of consolidation. Legal ops managers are cutting tools that don’t deliver, simplifying vendor lists, and prioritizing platforms that can do more with less.

Budget pressure is a big part of this shift. 58 per cent of legal departments have reported flat or shrinking tech budgets in 2024. Therefore, legal ops must be selective about which tools they implement, and directly prove each solution’s ROI.

“CFOs continue to take the lead and are focusing on responsible growth, making it essential for legal ops to present strong business cases for legal tech investments”, explains Today’s General Counsel.

But it’s not just about cost... it’s also about usage. Too many tools sit untouched while legal teams fall back on email and Word. In response, ops leaders are investing in platforms that support end-to-end workflows. For example, contract automation platforms that handle creation, negotiation, review, approvals, and signatures. 

Adoption matters more than feature lists. If a tool isn’t being used daily by both legal and the wider business, it’s on the chopping block.

5. Data literacy as a core skill

Other departments have been data-driven for years. Now it’s legal’s turn. Legal ops teams are under growing pressure to improve performance and prove their impact – and that starts with data literacy.

According to The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), we’re now in Legal Ops 3.0, with data literacy a key pillar.

CLOC President Jenn McCarron defines Legal Ops 3.0 as follows: “Legal Ops 3.0 challenges us to expand our capabilities, leveraging advanced tools and AI to redefine service delivery and success in operations. This new phase encourages us to transition from tactical problem solvers to strategic wayfinders, with data serving as the cornerstone of our strategies”.

Take your contracting processes, for example. Data like cycle times, fallback rates, negotiation durations, and time-to-sign are valuable levers for driving change. The most effective legal teams monitor this data closely – and use it to remove unnecessary bottlenecks.

But to do that well, legal ops professionals need to be fluent in the data. Understanding what the numbers are saying – and what to do next – is now a core part of the role. It’s how legal proves its value and scales its impact.

Want advice on how to use data more effectively? Check out this guide to legal data storytelling.

6. Routine contracting becomes instantaneous

Routine contracts are finally getting out of legal’s way. In 2025, legal ops teams are pushing to make routine contracting instant. NDAs, DPAs, MSAs – the low-risk, high-volume agreements that used to clog inboxes – are now being generated, reviewed, and signed in minutes. We know that because we enable businesses to achieve it.

Legal teams are building self-serve contract workflows that let other business teams create contracts on their own – with embedded guardrails that keep everything compliant. AI handles reviews, flags issues, and suggests redlines. Legal only steps in when something deviates from the usual playbook.

The payoff is huge: faster deal cycles, fewer bottlenecks, and more time for strategic work.

For example, Juro customer Funnel automated 8,000 manual contract touchpoints per year and reduced contract reviews by 88 per cent. Meanwhile, Placemakr’s team has saved 50 per cent of the time it spent on contracts by replacing six systems with one: Juro. 

In 2025, there’s no reason why your legal team should waste precious time handling routine contracts. Use tools that allow you to automatically bake in best practices and let your colleagues self-serve.  To find out how Juro can help you achieve similar results, hit the button below to speak to our team.

7. Collaboration across functions blurs role boundaries

The wall between legal and “the business” is coming down. Today, legal is a true business partner. Indeed, a 2024 Gartner survey found that legal leaders ranked “strengthening their personal impact on company strategy” as their top priority. 

This shift extends beyond leadership. Legal ops teams are working directly with sales, procurement, finance, and HR to get work over the line faster. They co-own OKRs, join cross-functional projects, and help build systems that serve everyone – not just legal. The question is no longer “who owns this contract?” but “how do we get it done?”

Legal ops teams are no longer siloed away from the rest of the business. Instead, they’re actively involved – whether that’s leading multi-department projects, supporting product launches, or helping define business processes. The result? A legal function that’s seen as a builder, rather than a blocker.

8. Playbooks become operational infrastructure

Static playbooks are out. In 2025, the best legal teams are embedding dynamic contract playbooks directly into the systems where work happens.

These playbooks don’t live in forgotten PDFs. They’re active components of your contract platform – surfacing fallback clauses, flagging redlines, and enabling faster decisions. They guide both humans and AI, acting as real-time guardrails for compliant, self-serve contracting.

This shift is key to scaling legal. When playbooks are embedded into workflows, negotiations move faster, compliance improves, and business teams can act without waiting on legal. This has a huge impact on legal teams’ productivity. For example, Juro’s dynamic playbooks have saved 30 per cent of RVU’s legal team’s time from handling low-value contract work. 

If automation is the engine, playbooks are the blueprint. Today’s most effective legal teams are building both.

Why legal operations teams are using Juro

Legal ops isn’t standing still – and neither are the teams leading it. From hiring legal engineers to embedding AI and data into workflows, 2025 is all about building smarter systems, not just working harder. The trends we’ve covered show where legal is heading. The opportunity now is to act.

At Juro, we help legal teams do just that. Our contract automation platform replaces disconnected tools with one workspace where legal, sales, and procurement can collaborate, close contracts faster, and stay compliant – without legal becoming a bottleneck.

Want to see how it works? Fill in the form below to book a demo and explore how Juro can support your legal ops transformation.