Every 2026 finalist. One ballot.
27 finalists, nine categories, 234 submissions, winners named October 25 in Boston. Mark your picks on this unofficial reader ballot, open any dossier, or ask the AI Legal Analyst about the field. Disclosure: Terms.Law, my firm, is a Law Firm finalist.
Unofficial guide by Terms.Law (Law Office of Sergei Tokmakov), one of the finalists. I am not affiliated with the American Legal Technology Awards and have not seen any finalist’s entry, including what the judges considered; each profile is my reading of publicly available sources, last verified September 17, 2026. Picks made here are not submitted anywhere and do not affect judging.
Where each finalist sits is my reading of its public work, placed on two axes. It is a taxonomy, not a ranking. Click a dot for the dossier.
Ask about the finalists
The same AI Legal Analyst that runs on the rest of Terms.Law, pointed at this page's research. It answers from the finalist file above, names its sources, and says when something is not on record. It does not pick winners.
Attorney-supervised, not legal advice. For a legal question, use the AI Legal Analyst on the homepage.
Three answers to what a law firm can be
The judges put a 700-lawyer national firm, a flat-fee family-law boutique, and a one-lawyer practice with no staff in the same final three. Same category, three different theories of how technology changes a firm.
Baker Donelson
National firm, Memphis and 20+ offices
- Lawyers
- 700+ attorneys and public policy advisors
- Innovation staff
- 20+ in-house client-solutions professionals
- Delivery
- Legal project management on 13,000+ matters since 2012
- Pricing
- 11,000+ alternative-fee engagements
- AI
- Firmwide approved AI for drafting, contracts, diligence, research
- Theory
- Scale the institution, then systematize it
Evolve Family Law
Family-law boutique, Saskatoon, Canada
- Lawyers
- 1 plus an articling student and a small team
- Innovation staff
- None the founder redesigns the model himself
- Delivery
- Remote-first across Canada: video, online documents, e-signature
- Pricing
- Every service unbundled, priced flat, never hourly
- AI
- Virtual receptionists for intake and after-hours
- Theory
- Redesign the price and the delivery first
Terms.Law (my firm)
Solo business-law practice, San Diego
- Lawyers
- 1 and zero staff
- Innovation staff
- None the software is the staff
- Delivery
- 10,224 pages; 113 generators; 914 automated reviews; written, fixed-fee work
- Pricing
- Fixed fees, e-sign engagement, no hourly intake calls
- AI
- AI Legal Analyst on 12,903 pages; 395 conversations in 30 days
- Theory
- Make one lawyer’s judgment reach further through automation
The organizers’ finalist badge, issued September 17, 2026.How Terms.Law works
People who have seen me share articles assume Terms.Law is a blog. It is a law practice run as software: more than 10,000 pages organized around specific legal problems and tools, and on nearly every one of them you can ask about your own situation and upload your documents instead of reading about problems like yours.
- A page for your exact problemAn unpaid invoice, a frozen Stripe account, a contractor who walked off, a SaaS contract you were just handed. Each page is built for one situation, in five languages.
- Ask, do not readThe AI Legal Analyst on that page already knows the topic. Describe what happened, upload the contract or the emails, and it helps organize the facts, the documents, and the issues for my review, and names a realistic next step.
- Do it yourself if it is simple113 document generators, demand-letter libraries, calculators, and 914 automated terms-of-service and privacy reviews, free and without a signup.
- A fixed fee if it is notIntegrated intake, conflict and scope screening, an e-signed engagement letter that states the exact fee, delivery in writing, and a private client workroom for the matter.
- The lawyer decidesEvery paid deliverable is attorney-reviewed. The AI stack, the workrooms, the free legal clinics, and one public post-mortem of a failure are published for anyone to inspect.
No associates, no paralegals, no developers, no vendor platform at the core. The attorney built the systems and rebuilds them, which is what the nomination in the Law Firm category is about: what one lawyer can operate when the infrastructure is software. This page is itself a working example: the same grounded AI interface, structured data, and source-backed profiles the practice runs on.
Terms.Law, measured
Every figure below was counted on September 17, 2026 from sources anyone could re-run. No traffic totals, because raw analytics for this site include data-center bots.
How each figure was counted. 1 / 0 lawyer / staff: Sergei Tokmakov, California Bar #279869, runs the practice alone; 10,224 pages in the sitemap: sitemap.xml, September 6, 2026 build; the raw tree holds 13,593 HTML files including taxonomy stubs; 12,903 pages carrying the AI Legal Analyst: count of pages loading the chat widget, September 17, 2026; 395 AI conversations in 30 days: matter threads touched August 18 to September 17, 2026, in the live database; 788 turns; 914 automated terms and privacy reviews: ToS Watchdog and Privacy Watchdog pages; 113 document generators: generator pages in the templates library; plus 1,807 demand-letter pages, 85 calculators, 2,680 forum threads, and pages in English, Spanish, Russian, Thai, and Chinese.
What the field says
Read across all 27 finalists, the common thread is not that someone put a chatbot on a website. It is that technology is being wired into the delivery of legal help: behind community advocates at Frontline Justice, inside a trial court's default-judgment queue in Los Angeles, around the verification of AI output at Benchly, beneath it as structured law at OpenLaws, and into the business model of a firm, whether that is Evolve's flat fees or Baker Donelson's pricing and project-management teams.
My own entry is the smallest organization on the list, and that is the point of it. Terms.Law is what one lawyer can operate when the practice's infrastructure is software: a library of guides, generators, and automated reviews that people find on their own, an AI Legal Analyst on nearly every page that organizes a visitor's facts and evidence before I ever open the file, and fixed-fee work delivered in writing. The lawyer still decides. The judgment, the drafting that matters, and the responsibility stay with me.
There is a personal reason I like the size of the field. I came to the United States in 1995 as a Rotary exchange student from a closed nuclear-submarine town in the Russian Far East, went home, won a green card in the lottery, and went to law school in Boston on a scholarship. What I saw in America was that you could start from zero. Terms.Law is the same idea with better tools: one person, no staff, and, used carefully, technology that does not care how big your firm is. The awards are in Boston on October 25, a few miles from where my legal life began.
Winners are announced that night. Until then, the ballot above is yours.
How this page was made
The finalist list is the organizers' announcement of September 16, 2026, reprinted by LawSites. Each dossier was compiled from the finalist's own site and public reporting, and lists its sources. The Awards do not publish the nominations, so I do not know what any finalist submitted or what the judges weighed; nothing here speaks for the organizers or for another finalist. The AI Legal Analyst on this page reads the same data file the ballot is drawn from, so the two cannot disagree. The lens colors and the map are a taxonomy, not a ranking. Corrections are welcome at owner@terms.law.
Sources
- Organizers' finalist announcement, reprinted by LawSites (September 16, 2026)
- American Legal Technology Awards, official site
- 2026 program announcement, LawSites (July 2, 2026)
- 2025 winners, National Law Review (October 2025)
- Each finalist dossier lists its own sources; open a finalist and expand Sources.
Related on Terms.Law: the AI Legal Analyst, how I built it, the small-law AI lab, and about me.
This page is independent commentary and information about a public awards program by one of its finalists; it is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by the American Legal Technology Awards or any other finalist. It is not legal advice, and reading it or chatting with the AI Legal Analyst does not create an attorney-client relationship. Descriptions of other finalists come from their own published materials and public reporting; trademarks belong to their owners. Sergei Tokmakov, Esq., California State Bar No. 279869. Verify license.