Extract from Reveal’s article, “How to Evaluate Agentic AI Tools for Litigation Work Beyond Fact Finding.”
Agentic AI has moved quickly from concept to vendor pitch, but the distance between what vendors market and what their tools deliver is significant. In June 2025, Gartner predicted that over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027 due to escalating costs, unclear business value, or inadequate risk controls, and estimated that only about 130 of the thousands of vendors marketing agentic capabilities actually deliver them. For legal teams, that distance matters more than in most industries. A tool that performs well in a demo can still fail when its output has to survive a meet-and-confer, a privilege challenge, or a motion to compel.
Interest is not the obstacle. Document review ranked as the leading generative AI use case among legal professionals at 77%, according to LawSites’ coverage of the Thomson Reuters Institute 2025 Generative AI in Professional Services Report. The open question for most teams is how to evaluate legal agentic AI against the full range of litigation work, not only the part that is easiest to demonstrate.
