A newly released second-quarter report on legal technology buying behaviour has found that a dramatic spike in attorney engagement earlier this year was driven by seasonal evaluation cycles.
The Q1 2026 surge, which saw law firms scheduling demos at rates 40% to 50% higher than normal across nearly every major practice area, has now visibly reversed in the Q2 data.
The Q2 2026 Legal Tech Buyer Intelligence Report was produced by FlyTech, a marketing agency specialising in advertising for legal vendors, in partnership with LawSites.
The report draws on FlyTech’s proprietary demo-booking and buying-intent data to measure competition and demand across the legal technology market throughout the second quarter.
Cost per lead rose across every single practice area in Q2, representing a clear reversal of Q1’s broad declines and signalling that fewer attorneys were actively in-market during the period.
The steepest cost increases hit business at 38.1%, criminal defense at 37.2%, and intellectual property at 37.1%, with family law and immigration close behind at 33.7% and 29.5% respectively.
“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.”
Despite the overall cost increase, the report introduces new buying-intent data revealing that demand is heavily concentrated in a handful of product categories and practice areas rather than evenly distributed across the market.
Firms show the strongest in-market signals for demand letters and medical review solutions, at nearly six times the category average, representing a 474% premium above the baseline buying-intent index.
A second tier of above-average intent includes staffing at 109%, trial support at 97%, intake at 96%, and practice management at 87%, with financial services the only other above-average category at 42%.
According to Dean Shapero, cofounder and CEO of FlyTech, categories with higher intent saw law firms actually completing purchases at higher rates, while lower-intent categories may attract demos without converting to sales at the same pace.
When broken down by practice area, personal injury firms lead buying intent by a wide margin, showing 88% more in-market activity than the average firm across all categories.
Employment at 47%, criminal defense at 32%, and family law at 30% form a secondary tier, while transactional practices including real estate, immigration, and bankruptcy sit at or below average.
Personal injury also posted the smallest cost-per-lead increase of any practice area at just 16.3%, landing at approximately $293 per lead and making it among the more efficient practice areas for vendors to target.
The report also introduces new data on how attorneys evaluate legal technology, finding that one in three attorneys who book a demo go on to schedule multiple demos within the same week.
Those repeat evaluators typically engage with 3.2 vendors on average, and 4% of attorneys book demos with six or more competing products during their evaluation process.
“Winning isn’t about being discovered in a vacuum, it’s about standing out inside a consideration set of three,” the report states, reshaping how legal tech vendors should think about competitive positioning.
On the question of cost corrections, lead generation fell 30.5% to $704 per lead in Q2, while practice management dropped 62.4% to $175, following warnings in the Q1 report that those elevated levels looked unsustainable.
Depositions and court reporting led the correction with a 74.6% decline to roughly $100, while document management fell 50.3% and marketing services declined 45.6% during the same period.
The report notes that geography also influences buying intent, with firms in major cities evaluating more vendors and moving through the purchasing funnel 24% faster than those in secondary or rural markets.
The report cautions that the findings reflect FlyTech’s proprietary advertising platform data and represent one vendor’s view of the market, though the patterns are consistent across two consecutive quarters of reporting.