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Top 5 Legal Trends and Priorities in 2025
Legal trends to expect in 2025
What are the top priorities for legal leaders in 2025? Gartner surveyed legal leaders across various industries and revenue bands to identify their most pressing priorities in 2025. Over 60% of respondents are prioritizing improving third-party and extended enterprise risk management for the upcoming year.
Download the Gartner Legal Trends Report to discover:
- Top 5 priorities for legal leaders in 2025
- Complimentary resources for addressing these crucial priorities
- Key drivers and recommended actions for each priority
Webinar: Top Legal Trends and Priorities for GC in 2025
In this complimentary webinar, Gartner experts deep dive into three critical imperatives that General Counsel faces in 2025 to stay ahead in the evolving legal landscape.
What is the Gartner Legal Trends and Priorities report?
This report is based on Gartner's annual Survey of Legal and Compliance Leader Priorities & Challenges. Each year, we ask legal leaders to identify their top priorities for the upcoming year. Our goal is to gain a deeper understanding of their current agendas and workflows, as well as to guide the direction of our research for the coming year, with a focus on emerging legal trends.
In 2025, two recurring themes—supporting business growth and harnessing AI advancements—stood out among the top five priorities for nearly 100 leaders who participated in our survey. Additionally, legal leaders are placing a strong emphasis on managing third-party, cyber, and AI risks, while also seeking to improve the efficiency of contract risk management and exploring AI use cases for the legal function. These priorities reflect the evolving legal trends that are shaping the industry.
Legal Trends FAQs
What are the key legal trends and priorities for 2025?
- Improve the approach to managing third-party risks and extended enterprise
- Improve the effectiveness of cyber risk management governance and oversight
- Evolve or implement the approach to AI governance at the organization
- Identify opportunities for leveraging GenAI applications for the function
- Increase the efficiency of commercial contracts management process
How can legal leaders leverage the latest legal trends?
The Gartner top priorities for legal report is designed to offer legal leadership teams a better understanding of emerging legal trends and insight into what their peers are focusing on in the year ahead to maximize their impact.
What is the importance of legal trends?
It is essential for legal leaders to keep pace with an evolving, often unpredictable risk and regulatory landscape. This will help them proactively address future uncertainties, extend time horizons for planning, make predictions and build scenarios.