Legal Tech Trends February 2026: Why the Shift to AI Agents Needs Better Input

The big news this week is Thomson Reuters finally rolling out their CoCounsel agentic workflows. We've been talking about "agents" for two years, but seeing them actually handle multi-step tasks in a live legal environment feels different. The promise is huge: give the AI a complex instruction, and it goes off to research, draft, and verify.

But there is a bottleneck nobody mentions. The input.

You still have to type out these complex instructions. And if you are a lawyer billing by the hour, typing at 40 words per minute into a chat box feels like a step backward. We are building these incredible engines, but we are feeding them with a teaspoon.

I've been testing this workflow myself. When you try to prompt an agent to "review this contract clause against the new California AI disclosure law from Feb 1st," you need precision. You need to explain the context, the client's risk tolerance, and the specific jurisdiction. That is a paragraph, maybe two. Typing that takes time. Dictating it takes seconds.

This is where the "Agentic Input" concept comes in. It's not just about speech-to-text anymore. It is about high-bandwidth communication with your tools. If you can speak at 150 words per minute, you can give your AI agent the nuance it needs to actually work.

The problem for most firms is that their work happens inside Citrix or a remote desktop. The AI agent might be in the cloud, but the document is locked behind a virtual wall. Most dictation tools fail here. They depend on cloud APIs that can't "see" or "type" into the VDI session reliably.

That is why I built DictaFlow to handle this specific problem. It uses a driver-level input simulation that works regardless of where your cursor is. It doesn't care if you are in a local Word doc or a remote Clio instance inside Citrix. You hold the key, you talk, and it types.

If we are going to rely on agents to do the heavy lifting, we need to get better at delegation. And delegation has always been a verbal skill.

Try dictaflow for yourself. It is Windows-native and built for this exact workflow.