In April, I reported here on a dramatic first-quarter 2026 increase in the numbers of legal tech demos law firms were scheduling, with the numbers going up across nearly every major practice area by as much as 40% to 50%. Now, it appears that trend has reversed, according to a newly released report on legal […]
In April, I reported here on a dramatic first-quarter 2026 increase in the numbers of legal tech demos law firms were scheduling, with the numbers going up across nearly every major practice area by as much as 40% to 50%.
Now, it appears that trend has reversed, according to a newly released report on legal technology buying behavior during the second quarter of the year, suggesting that the first quarter’s surge in attorney engagement was driven largely by seasonal evaluation cycles rather than a permanent shift in demand.
But the report also introduces new buying-intent data that tells a more granular story, indicating that demand for legal technology is not evenly distributed across the market. It is heavily concentrated in a handful of product categories and practice areas – led, by a wide margin, by personal injury firms.
The Q2 2026 Legal Tech Buyer Intelligence Report was produced by FlyTech, a marketing agency specializing in advertising for legal vendors, in partnership with LawSites.
As with the Q1 edition that I previously covered, the report draws on FlyTech’s proprietary demo-booking and buying-intent data to measure competition and demand across the legal tech market.
Shifting Demand Or Seasonal Wave?
When I wrote about the Q1 report, I said the second quarter’s data would be the real test of whether the broad 40-50% increase in demos (and corollary drop in cost per lead reflected a structural shift in attorney demand or a seasonal wave. If costs stayed low through Q2, I suggested, that would be evidence of a fundamentally different demand environment.
With the Q2 data now in, it appears that the prior results were, in fact, seasonal. CPL rose across every single practice area in Q2, a clear reversal of Q1’s declines. The steepest increases hit business (+38.1%), criminal defense (+37.2%), and intellectual property (+37.1%), with family (+33.7%) and immigration (+29.5%) close behind.
“The Q1 engagement wave – attorneys flooding in to evaluate tools after year-end budget cycles – has receded,” the report concludes, “and with fewer attorneys in-market, the cost to reach each qualified one climbed back up across the board.”
That said, Q2 costs did not return to some pre-2025 baseline uniformly. Several categories remain notably cheaper than they were two quarters ago, and the new buying-intent data in this report shows pockets of demand that are anything but seasonal.
How Attorneys Shop: The Rule of Three
An interesting new addition in this Q2 report is data on how attorneys evaluate legal technology, and it could impact how vendors think about competition.
According to the report, one in three attorneys who book a demo end up booking multiple demos within a week, and those repeat evaluators typically schedule demos with three different vendors – 3.2 on average. Four percent book demos with six or more products.
For vendors, the report concludes, this significantly reshapes the competitive environment. “Winning isn’t about being discovered in a vacuum – it’s about standing out inside a consideration set of three.”
I would add that this also raises the stakes for the demo itself. If a third of your prospects are seeing two or three competitors during the same week, that demo could make or break the deal.
Where Buying Intent Is Concentrated
Another interesting addition to this Q2 report is its buying-intent index, which scores the likelihood that a firm is in-market to actually purchase, expressed relative to the average legal tech firm.
When broken down by product category, intent is strikingly concentrated. Firms show the strongest in-market signals for demand letters and medical review solutions, at nearly six times the category average (+474%).
A second tier is at roughly double the average and includes staffing (+109%), trial support (+97%), intake (+96%), and practice management (+87%). The only other above-average category is financial services (+42%).
Most other categories show below-average in-market activity, which the report characterizes as steadier, less concentrated demand rather than surging interest.
What this means, according to Dean Shapero, cofounder and CEO of FlyTech, is that the categories with higher “intent” were having law firms actually make purchase at higher rates on average. The categories with lower intent may still get a lot of demos, but law firms are actually buying at a slower rate.
When buying intent is broken down by practice area, personal injury firms lead by a wide margin, showing 88% more buying intent than the average firm. Employment (+47%), criminal defense (+32%), and family (+30%) form a second tier, while transactional and specialized practices (real estate, immigration and bankruptcy) are at or below average.
At the same time, PI posted the smallest cost increase of any practice area (+16.3%), a flip from Q1, when PI was the one practice area where costs rose while everything else fell. With a CPL of roughly $293, the report says, PI is now at a level that makes it among the more efficient practice areas to reach.
For vendors, the report notes, that means that PI is where both demand and reachability are moving in their favor.
One other factor influencing buying intent is geography, the report finds. Firms in major cities evaluate more vendors and move through the funnel 24% faster than firms in secondary or rural markets.
The Correction Arrives
The Q1 report identified lead generation, at over $1,000 per lead, and practice management, at nearly $500, as potential ceilings for those categories – levels that, as I wrote at the time, looked hard to sustain. Q2’s data indicates a correction to those trends.
While lead generation is still the most expensive category, it fell 30.5% to $704. Practice management dropped 62.4% to $175.
Depositions and court reporting, which had nearly doubled in Q1, led the correction with a 74.6% decline to roughly $100. Document management fell 50.3% to $94, marketing services declined 45.6% to $221, and IT services dropped 40.6% to $107.
The pattern the report identifies is that niche and specialized categories generally got cheaper in Q2, while generalized legal software products tended to drive overall costs higher, thanks to increased competition from VC-backed entrants and the expansion of general-purpose AI providers such as Anthropic into legal.
Even so, a few categories saw costs go up, including trial support (+45.3%), intake (+23.3%), and staffing (+21.9%).
Takeaways For Legal Tech Vendors
As I noted with the Q1 report, these quarterly reports are just snapshots of overall market performance. FlyTech plans to continue to produce them each quarter, and over time, the data will paint a broader picture.
That said, if you read these two quarterly reports together, they offer some preliminary conclusions.
For one, there may in fact be a seasonal rhythm to legal tech buying. The data suggests that Q1 is when attorneys shop. That means vendors may want to plan their campaigns accordingly.
For another, there is evidence that demand is clustering in litigation-adjacent and revenue-related categories such as medical review, intake, trial support and staffing, as well as in personal injury and other contingency-based practices.
Finally, when categories get overheated, they also get corrected. When the cost of acquiring a single lead reaches four figures, the market brings that back down to a more rational level.
The caveat I gave about the Q1 report is worth repeating here, which is that this is based on FlyTech’s proprietary data from its own advertising platform, reflecting only the slice of the market that runs campaigns through its network. Even though it is a substantial dataset, it is nevertheless one vendor’s view of the market.
Still, over two quarters now, the findings reflect what I hear from vendors and firms. Attorney interest in legal technology is high, even as it becomes increasingly selective, seasonal and sophisticated.
