AI Won't Shrink Your Caseload — It Will Flood It: The Jevons Paradox Coming for Law Firms in 2026, and Why Your Back Office Becomes the Constraint

The prevailing anxiety about legal AI is that it shrinks the work. A growing view among law firm leaders is the opposite: as legal work gets cheaper, people buy more of it. If that's right, 2026's winners aren't the firms with the best AI — they're the firms whose intake, billing, and trust accounting can absorb double the matter volume without doubling headcount.