The race for brand heat is tighter than ever. L.E.K. Consulting’s 2026 Brand Heat Index reveals which footwear, apparel and accessories brands are capturing attention, which are gaining momentum and how heat varies across gender and generation.

Based on a survey of approximately 6,000 U.S. consumers ages 14 to 55 who have purchased footwear, apparel or related goods in the past 12 months, the report measures relative brand popularity across major categories using a standardized heat index, with consumers evaluating approximately 650 brands.

In 2026, outdoor and athletic categories continue to generate the highest heat scores overall, competition at the top is increasingly tight and premium brands are rising across multiple segments. For the first time, this year’s Index also includes Bags & luggage, as well as Outdoor equipment & sporting goods, expanding the view of brand momentum beyond footwear and apparel into accessories and gear.

Highlights from this year’s findings

• Outdoor and athletic categories continue to have the highest heat scores overall, as consumers look to these brands for both performance and lifestyle occasions.
• Competition at the top is intensifying, with seven out of 16 footwear and apparel categories showing the top three brands within 10 points of one another.
• Premium brands are rising across categories, with accessible luxury performing particularly well in dress and select footwear segments.
• Brand heat differs meaningfully by gender and generation, with women and younger consumers featuring a higher proportion of newcomer brands in their Top 10 rankings.
• Bags & luggage and outdoor equipment & sporting goods make their debut this year, with digitally native and recreation-driven brands showing strong cross-generational relevance.

What is driving these shifts? Consumer feedback indicates that a strong, authentic social media presence is a core driver of brand heat, particularly among younger generations, where social-native emerging brands appear in multiple Top 10 lists. Generational and gender differences play a critical role in shaping brand momentum, requiring targeted and segment-specific strategies to win.

With emerging brands gaining ground, premium players climbing the ranks and competition tightening across categories, understanding brand heat at a granular level has never been more important.

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Curious about what it takes to build brand heat in your increasingly competitive market? Let’s explore where you stand, what could unlock brand heat and where you could go next.

The challenge

Scaling from a development-stage biotech to a fully commercial organization is a pivotal moment in value creation, but it also brings greater operational complexity and financial risk. To manage this inflection point, emerging biotechs often adopt intentionally lean commercial models, including small field teams, tight budgets, limited customer-support capacity and fragmented data infrastructure.

These choices allow companies to move fast and preserve capital, but their limitations become increasingly noticeable as the business grows. Advanced commercial capabilities become practical only when true scale is achieved — typically when a company has multiple products on the market. At that stage, organizations can fully benefit from sophisticated approaches such as broad omnichannel campaigns, vendor-driven analytics, enterprise next-best-action engines, and comprehensive patient and provider support services. Before reaching scale, however, these capabilities are often too expensive, too complex and misaligned with near-term ROI. As a result, emerging biotechs must learn to commercialize effectively with less — prioritizing targeted investments, streamlining operating models, and implementing pragmatic data and technology strategies that balance ambition with reality.

This article highlights a set of novel AI use cases, proven in large pharma, that can be adapted to smaller biotechs as they prepare for their first launch.

A focus on commercial efficiency

The promise of AI is, in part, to give smaller biotechs a practical way to narrow the commercial gap with larger pharma companies. But capturing the early value of that promise depends on focusing on a few targeted use cases — those that directly address the most pressing bottlenecks at launch.

A disciplined approach to AI enables biotechs to expand their operational capacity and impact without adding headcount.Three proven AI applications in drug commercialization consistently deliver positive returns and can be realistically implemented by biotechs preparing for their first launch.

1. Meeting efficiency and agentic field force copilots

The first suggestion is obvious. Make sure your teams have operationalized the meeting efficiency features that you probably already own! These include AI based meeting prep tools and meeting close out tools, such as transcription and CRM management features.

Beyond the basics, AI copilots can help lean sales teams operate with the efficiency of a much larger force — planning routes, sequencing HCP visits, generating compliant personalized content and linking CRM data to specific account activities. These capabilities boost day-to-day productivity, and they also strengthen the foundation for more advanced commercial processes.

One of the most important of those processes is dynamic targeting, which many biotechs rely on to find the right patients and prioritize the right accounts. Agentic copilots can enhance this system by feeding real-time signals back into the CRM targeting loop, improving both accuracy and efficiency. By drawing on broader data sources — claims, referral patterns, digital interactions — copilots can uncover insights such as predicting early adopters or emerging high-value accounts that would otherwise remain hidden.

Not every biotech needs copilot support, especially those selling into a small set of specialized centers with well-defined patient populations. But for lean field teams operating in more diffuse markets, copilots can be used selectively — for example, when prospecting beyond a core HCP call list — to extend reach without disrupting a relationship-driven model.

What the research shows

L.E.K. Consulting’s experience indicates that 10% to 15% of AI use cases deliver roughly 80% of the value, with field productivity consistently among the top drivers. Public examples support this pattern. J&J’s Rep Copilot, which manages automated call planning and routing, was one of the few pilots that proved ROI-positive. Several large pharma companies, including Takeda, Pfizer and Sanofi, have also adopted Salesforce’s Life Sciences Cloud, an agentic platform used for hyper-personalized HCP engagement, route optimization and automated sampling. 

How this fits the biotech model

In a competitive landscape where large pharma sets the standard for launch excellence, biotechs can close the gap by systematically turning CRM insights into targeted, scalable commercial actions. Lean field teams can expand their effective reach by optimizing call plans, prioritizing high-value interactions and personalizing engagement through integrated CRM-driven insights.

Risks and mitigations

Buy rather than build. Start narrow (e.g., scheduling and call preparation). Ensure CRM data is clean.

2.Market access automation: Amplifying the reach of FRMs

Prompt and proactive handling of payer hurdles can shape a launch trajectory as much as prescriber willingness to adopt a new therapy. In specialty areas like rare disease and oncology, field reimbursement managers (FRMs) play a critical role in helping physicians and patients navigate prior-authorization requirements, denials, appeals and benefit verification. Yet biotechs typically have only a small FRM team, and limited support can lead to delays that put patients at risk and weaken a brand’s competitive position.

Compounding the challenge, large FRM deployments and practice support services have conditioned many practices to expect hands-on support for even routine PA steps. AI can help bridge this gap by extending the productivity and reach of reimbursement teams, enabling small FRM groups to manage more cases, support more prescribers and reduce time to therapy.

What the research says

Biotechs have several practical options for expanding reimbursement capacity through AI and automation. Many industries already use chat-based triage to route work efficiently, and similar tools can help FRMs prioritize cases. Paperwork can be scanned and basic fields auto-completed while preserving patient anonymity, and custom LLMs, as Novartis demonstrated with Alia in medical communications, can support compliance.

Existing networks such as Surescripts also enable “touchless” prior authorization and real-time benefit checks, reducing cycle times. Automation tools can pre-fill payer forms and generate real-time status alerts. And when claims are denied, AI-driven appeal solutions such as Waystar’s Altitude Create can automate appeal letters, surface insights on appeal pathways and escalate stalled cases — helping small teams manage a higher volume with greater precision.

Fit for biotechs

Instead of scaling FRM headcount linearly, AI copilots can take on the repetitive, time-consuming tasks of case management, allowing FRMs to concentrate on the complex situations that truly require human judgment. This creates meaningful leverage, enabling a small FRM team to support far more providers and patient cases across geographies.

Risks and mitigations

Transparency and oversight must be maintained. Poorly governed automation can trigger payer pushback, so all payer-facing materials must remain compliant and fully auditable. Compliance should be built early as an enterprise capability — even before a biotech’s first commercial launch — and applied consistently across new platforms.

3.Smarter commercial operations

AI can transform how biotechs access, analyze and act on commercial data. For lean organizations that cannot support large pharma’s full “customer 360” engines, the opportunity lies in adopting a focused orchestration layer that turns disparate data into clear, actionable priorities. With a disciplined approach, biotechs can own the intelligence while renting the underlying infrastructure, turning data into a true competitive asset.

Practical solutions include dynamic patient-finding and targeting tools that improve efficiency and help resolve growth slowdowns at the district or regional level. AI can also automate many of the manual dashboarding and data-management tasks that consume commercial and field-leadership time, allowing business insights teams to concentrate on higher-value analysis.

AI is likewise reshaping commercial content creation and approval. Without discipline, biotechs risk generating too much content with too little impact. Staying effective requires AI that accelerates the creation of high-value assets while streamlining MLR review and ensuring compliance.

What the research says

Industry analyses find that refreshing dynamic targeting weekly, instead of quarterly, accelerates the adoption of new insights and strengthens HCP engagement. Data and CRM providers also report that AI-enabled sales force effectiveness can significantly expand field capacity without increasing headcount.

Across our biotech work, we’ve seen business insights teams spend 15% to 20% of their time manually generating reports, often limited to lagging indicators. For a typical biotech BIA team, this can amount to one FTE each year — time and resources that should instead be focused on developing predictive insights for decision-makers.

Fit for biotechs

For emerging biotechs, the goal isn’t to replicate large-pharma complexity; it’s to build a lightweight, agile operating system for commercial execution. By owning the orchestration logic (targeting, prioritization, messaging) and renting data infrastructure, biotechs can stay nimble, scale efficiently and avoid vendor lock-in as the organization evolves.

Risks and mitigations

Start by owning orchestration and insights, not the raw data infrastructure. Ensure unified data governance (see Figures 1 and 2). 

Copilots increase biotech field force efficiencies

Introducing an AI Rep Copilot can deliver substantial productivity gains. Below is an illustrative model based on conservative assumptions from industry pilots and benchmarks.

Agentic PA processing to enable FRM support

Agentic support for PA denial processing can leverage workflows from adjacent industries and deliver successful outcomes.

Takeaways for executives

Biotechs can easily overlook where AI truly adds value in commercialization, whereas often that caution is warranted. It prevents unnecessary spend, complex implementations and chasing hype. But with the right guidelines, commercial leaders can pinpoint a small set of AI applications that reliably deliver positive ROI and avoid expensive change management later. These include:

• Starting narrow with tools that expand scale (rep scheduling, PA automation, predictive patient-finding) and building from there
• Prioritizing use cases that work without scale, and deferring broad NBA or omnichannel systems until the organization is larger
• Designing your GTM model to scale up around these high-ROI applications, especially for first launches
• Embedding AI into daily workflows, treating copilots as extensions of sales, access and medical teams
• Done well, these steps give first-time biotechs pharma-grade precision and efficiency — without pharma-grade overhead.

For more information, please contact us. 

L.E.K. Consulting is a registered trademark of L.E.K. Consulting LLC. All other products and brands mentioned in this document are properties of their respective owners. © 2026 L.E.K. Consulting LLC 

Across Europe, the pursuit of healthier and more sustainable diets is reshaping supply chains and product portfolios. What began as a movement among conscious consumers now influences how value is created and captured across the food and beverage sector (see Figure 1).

At a recent lunch on the topic, hosted in partnership with Lincoln International, we illustrated how this shift has gathered pace.

A shift in consumer behaviour

European consumers have moved beyond signaling good intentions. They are changing what they buy and how they assess quality, even in the face of squeezed disposable incomes (see Figure 2).

L.E.K.’s 2024 Sustainability Survey found that almost 60% are willing to pay more for products with proven nutritional benefits, and nearly half now seek sustainable alternatives even in tighter economic conditions.

Digital transparency tools such as Yuka have also made product data an everyday reference point, reinforcing accountability across brands.

Policy pressure with commercial consequences

Europe’s regulatory framework is no longer an abstract goal-setting exercise. The Farm to Fork Strategy and Common Agricultural Policy are directing substantial funding toward organic and regenerative production. Updated labelling and information standards are tightening definitions and rewarding verifiable sustainability claims.

Increasing consumer demand and regulatory measures have created clear incentives for manufacturers to reformulate, although progress varies by category and price tier. Major food companies have reduced additives, cut sugar and salt, and introduced nitrite-free product lines in response to Nutri-Score and consumer scrutiny.

The result is a more transparent and disciplined market in which compliance and competitiveness increasingly align.

Innovation and capital flow through the value chain

The transition is generating distinct areas of opportunity across the value chain. Below, we identify four in particular:

• Biostimulants and regenerative inputs: Biological solutions are improving yields and soil resilience while reducing fertiliser use. The European biostimulants market, now around $1.4 billion, is expanding at roughly 10% a year, driven by better product performance and strong policy support.
• Clean-label functionality: Ingredient innovation continues to be driven by the naturalisation of formulations (replacement of synthetics, shorter and more recognisable ingredient lists), while increasingly focusing on delivering taste and texture parity with conventional products to secure repeat purchase.
• Traceability and sourcing systems: Digital platforms and certification networks are turning supply-chain transparency into measurable equity.
• Waste reduction and upcycling: Waste management is shifting from compliance to efficiency, capturing new value in energy, ingredients and logistics.

Each area is underpinned by investable science, repeatable business models and visible environmental impact (see Figure 3).

Investment momentum and consolidation

Recent M&A activity across Europe shows where strategic investors are placing their bets. Ingredient and formulation specialists have attracted sustained attention, offering scalability and steady B2B demand. Regenerative farming platforms and biocontrol companies appeal to investors seeking IP-based defensibility and predictable returns. Emerging brands, meanwhile, are focusing on verified sourcing and functional nutrition as differentiators.

Sustainability is proving to be an engine of pricing power and brand preference. Capital is following the operators that can demonstrate both environmental and financial performance.

However, critical challenges remain. Price-sensitive consumers still limit the reach of organic products; flavour and texture continue to constrain plant-based adoption; and inconsistent labelling erodes trust. Each issue has a technical solution: cost reduction through regenerative sourcing and scale efficiencies, sensory improvement through R&D partnerships, and transparent certification backed by evidence rather than claims.

The strategic horizon

Our analysis points to a set of clear priorities for executives hoping to shape the pace of progress:

• Strengthen supply-chain resilience and cost competitiveness through regenerative, diversified and more efficient sourcing models.
• Accelerate ingredient naturalisation at scale, while ensuring sensory and functional parity with conventional formulations.
• Embed verified data and certification to build trust, ensure compliance and support credible sustainability claims across the product lifecycle.

The sustainable food shift is well underway, but unlocking its full potential depends on converting it into disciplined strategy and measurable results — while addressing the constraints that could otherwise slow mainstream adoption.

Contact us to find out more.

L.E.K. Consulting is a registered trademark of L.E.K. Consulting LLC. All other products and brands mentioned in this document are properties of their respective owners. © 2026 L.E.K. Consulting LLC

As organisations enter 2026, uneven growth, tighter capital discipline and sustained cost pressure are reshaping how value is created. Across sectors, leadership focus is shifting from ambition to delivery — with pricing, productivity and digital execution now central to performance.

Look Forward 2026 brings together L.E.K. Consulting’s perspectives on the strategic priorities shaping the year ahead, outlining what organisations need to do to deliver performance and create value in a more demanding environment.

Sectors covered

• Consumer – Capturing value more deliberately
• Financial Services – Scaling advice and productivity
• Healthcare – Redesigning access, delivery and economics
• Industrials – Focusing on performance and resilience
• Life Sciences – Responding to pressure across the value chain
• Transport & Logistics – Competing beyond capacity

Explore the full report

Read Look Forward 2026 online or download a copy to examine the cross-sector forces shaping 2026, the priorities facing leadership teams, and how organisations are converting strategy into execution and value creation.

Want to discuss the implications for your organisation?

If you would like to explore how the themes in Look Forward 2026 apply to your sector or organisation, please contact one of the authors.

This collection brings together a focused selection of L.E.K. Consulting’s perspectives on the forces reshaping life sciences and biopharma. The sector continues to push at the boundaries of scientific possibility while navigating capital constraints, accelerating competition and rising expectations from patients, regulators and investors. The pieces included here examine those pressures with clarity and offer practical guidance on how leaders can respond with confidence.

Our insights highlight the strategic consequences of rapid advances in areas such as radiotherapeutics, next—generation oncology partnerships, AI and quantum computing. We also explore the commercial realities facing organisations as they compete in fast—moving therapeutic markets, reassess portfolio priorities, raise R&D productivity and operate in a more selective funding environment. Across these topics, a consistent message emerges: competitive advantage will rest with organisations that pair scientific ambition with disciplined decision—making and operational focus.

At L.E.K., we help clients interpret change and convert it into decisive action. By distilling market signals, emerging opportunities and the pressure points that matter most, this collection offers leaders a clear view of what it takes to steer successfully through a period of structural shifts.

For further insights into our analysis, download the full booklet.

Contact us for more information.

L.E.K. Consulting is a registered trademark of L.E.K. Consulting LLC. All other products and brands mentioned in this document are properties of their respective owners. © 2026 L.E.K. Consulting LLC

For decades, vertical integration has been the hallmark of the insurance industry’s strength. Many carriers built closed systems and outsourced noncore processes/services to vendors governed by service-level agreements (SLAs). In many lines, insurers also relied on independent agents and other third parties as primary distribution, which further reduced direct customer interactions. While the model delivered predictable operations, these structures often left insurers one step removed from customers.

In a market that is increasingly defined by speed, data and interconnected experiences, that distance has become a competitive liability. SLAs created structural blind spots for insurers by separating vendor performance from customer outcomes. Additionally, new and expanded distribution channels (e.g., aggregators, marketplaces, consumer products) have further isolated insurers from the end customer. Without customer access, carriers are starved of the insight needed to innovate, differentiate and compete at market speed.

Legacy servicing and sales models can’t keep up. Incumbent service providers have been slow to adapt, burdened by legacy systems and a reluctance to build and sustain the partnerships needed for innovation. Their belief that emerging models wouldn’t stick has become a costly strategic misread, leaving insurers disconnected from the important moments that build loyalty and trust.

Ecosystems are now redefining value creation across connected home, mobility, health, wealth and small business. These ecosystems are interconnected networks of companies that collaborate to serve customer needs in a unified, seamless experience — often orchestrated through shared data, APIs and digital infrastructure. This model replaces fragmented, vendor-driven handoffs with aligned incentives and continuous engagement. 

In this context, the question is no longer whether insurers should participate, but what role they will play. In this Executive Insights, L.E.K. Consulting examines the benefits of ecosystem participation, compares participation models and outlines a path for carriers to compete in a future defined by collaboration, not control. 

P&C insurers must embrace partnerships to stay competitive

Historically, customers pieced together solutions on their own, buying P&C coverage here and benefits coverage there. Carriers catered to this by being product-driven organizations. Today’s buyers are different; they want solutions and experiences built specifically for them.

They’re no longer comparing insurers to other insurers. Instead, they’re holding the industry to the elevated experience and service standards set by Amazon, Uber and other digital leaders — holistic, personalized, always available, seamlessly executed and connected across a broader portfolio of needs.

Insurance companies that once dominated the industry, leveraging a vertical integration model, have lost their edge. To compete effectively now, they must overhaul operating models, integrate and update technology, and produce products that customers want. New models such as embedded distribution, usage-based offerings and integrated service platforms are reshaping how customers buy and engage. To close innovation and customer journey gaps, insurers will have to participate in ecosystems powered by strategic partnerships.

Winning insurers will stop asking “How can I serve my customer?” and instead ask “How can we, together, deliver what the customer truly needs at the moment they need it?” Insurers that continue to leverage a self-contained model will risk missing out on new customers, channels and capabilities. To capitalize, they need to stop treating service partners as vendors or interchangeable add-ons, and start seeing them as cocreators of a broader customer experience and solution, innovation collaborators and market extenders.

No insurer controls the customer journey alone. Today, success requires partnership.

Ecosystem leaders in action

These dynamics aren’t just theoretical. Ping An, Marsh and Uber are examples of how insurers can create competitive advantages by redefining their role in ecosystems.

Ping An

Ping An is one of the world’s most valuable insurance groups and has evolved into an ecosystem orchestrator serving more than 240 million retail customers. Since 2008, it has rebuilt its model around technology and connected ecosystems across financial services, insurance, banking and asset management, in addition to health, auto services and smart city solutions. This structure links internal platforms with a broad network of third-party partners to deliver more comprehensive offerings.

For example, the Auto Owner app brings together insurance functions and automotive aftermarket services, giving car owners a single place to manage claims, request roadside assistance, and book repairs or maintenance through an extensive network of external service providers. This integrated approach boosts cross-selling and retention. Customers holding four or more contracts have a 98% retention rate, far higher than single-product users.

By connecting services and channels across its ecosystem, Ping An makes it easier for customers to adopt multiple products, increasing overall stickiness.

Marsh

Amazon requires all third-party sellers to carry product liability insurance, safeguarding their businesses against costly claims or legal action resulting from defective products or accidental damage. To make coverage easier and more affordable, Amazon partnered with Marsh to launch the Amazon Insurance Accelerator. This program connects sellers with a curated network of top small-business insurers.

Through a simplified application process, sellers can obtain competitive quotes and policies that are both Amazon-compliant and tailored to their specific risks.

Uber

Uber has built a global mobility ecosystem that connects riders, drivers, vehicle providers and service partners on a single platform. Insurance plays a critical but embedded role within this ecosystem. To meet varying regulatory and risk requirements, Uber maintains commercial auto insurance on behalf of drivers, working with different insurance carriers across states and renewing these arrangements regularly so coverage aligns with local requirements. Coverage for drivers is integrated directly into the platform, activated dynamically based on trip status and usage, and designed to remove friction for both drivers and riders.

By embedding insurance into the broader mobility journey and coordinating with multiple carriers, Uber protects ecosystem participants while maintaining control over the customer experience. Insurance becomes an enabler of the broader ecosystem, not the focal point.

These case studies underscore that ecosystem success depends on understanding and reshaping the full customer journey, not just individual touchpoints.

Rebuilding the customer relationship through ecosystems

Many insurers engage at discrete touchpoints within noninsurance ecosystems such as by offering auto coverage at the point of sale. This reactive approach leaves pre- and post-interactions a mystery, driving limited engagement, inconsistent loyalty and overlooked opportunities.

Disintermediation and limited touchpoints have weakened customer loyalty. Retention can no longer be assumed; it has to be earned continuously. Insurers that continue to serve customers at distinct touchpoints, either directly or through third parties, won’t understand broader customer needs and therefore limit the value they can deliver.

In a more transparent market, customer buying power will only increase. Insurance companies must understand, anticipate and deliver against these needs to remain relevant in the new ecosystem. To be successful, these companies will need to revisit core value propositions, invest differently and commit to change.

Ecosystems as growth engines

There are three paths to ecosystem participation:

• Participants: Plug into existing ecosystems
• Enablers: Provide infrastructure to ecosystem leaders
• Orchestrators: Build and govern the ecosystem

Whether insurers participate, enable or orchestrate, they gain access to valuable customer data. This data can help them better understand the customer life cycle, meet multiple needs, increase engagement frequency, tailor solutions and deepen relationships.

Consider a home purchase. Traditionally, insurers offered homeowners’ coverage and optional riders such as for jewelry. However, a true ecosystem orchestrator understands the broader chain of potential needs triggered by a home purchase, including home security, auto purchase, life insurance and even pet adoption. By connecting the dots through partnerships, insurers can capture a larger share of wallet and build stickier relationships.

Orchestration is complex and costly. Understanding the differences between orchestrators and enablers/participants is essential, particularly for insurers that have traditionally operated as enablers. The chart maps out key considerations of ecosystem players

(see Figure 1). 

Ecosystems unlock growth, but only if you choose your role with intent: orchestrator, enabler or participant. 

Finding your role in the ecosystem

We help insurers shift from closed, vertically integrated models to open, ecosystem-driven strategies. Insurers have to first develop a thorough understanding of their customers’ needs and intentions. The central question shifts from “What do we offer?” to “What is the customer trying to achieve?”

Before repositioning, insurers must answer these questions:

• What parts of the customer journey can we influence?
• Which partners expand our ability to solve more of the customers’ problems?
• How can we better position ourselves to shape the journey?
• How can we enhance the customer journey by improving customer experience and outcomes?

Once insurers define where they want to play, they must evaluate internal realities, including: Is our performance management system equipped to drive innovation, or do we need strategic partnerships to fill the gaps? Do we have resources to commit? Is there an appetite for shared risk?

This self-assessment is critical. To make the leap from product to solutions, insurers must identify capability gaps and determine how to address them, whether through partnerships, acquisitions or targeted investments.

Take auto insurance: Delivering personalized policies often requires partnering with original equipment manufacturers to access real-time driver behavior data in addition to investing in a customer-facing platform. For carriers without the appetite for building these capabilities, acquiring or partnering with a technology provider that offers the necessary infrastructure can provide a faster path.

Who should orchestrate vs. participate?

Embedded insurance alone presents enormous potential, with a projected CAGR of approximately 26% through 2033. But capturing this growth depends on more than attaching products at the point of sale. It requires insurers to define their role in the ecosystem — participant, enabler or orchestrator — and to act decisively.

Not every insurer should orchestrate, but all insurers must determine their role within the ecosystem. The table illustrates what is at stake (see Table 1). 

Why insurers must build, not just protect

The next insurance leaders won’t be those that protect their turf. Instead they will be those that build the terrain. The window to orchestrate ecosystems is open now, and hesitation will only result in irrelevance. Insurers don’t need to rebuild from scratch; they need to define the role they intend to play and recruit partners who will help them own the customer journey.

The future isn’t about owning more; it’s about becoming indispensable to the journeys customers are already living.

Contact us to find out more.

L.E.K. Consulting is a registered trademark of L.E.K. Consulting LLC. All other products and brands mentioned in this document are properties of their respective owners. © 2026 L.E.K. Consulting LLC 

The eDiscovery industry is being reshaped by expanding data volumes, accelerating use of AI, and an increasingly fragmented tools landscape. For many clients, the challenge is not any single change, but the accumulation of them which requires careful coordination and technical expertise to ensure legal defensibility.

Alternative Legal Service Providers (ALSPs) help clients navigate these challenges, translating AI from promise into practical use-cases, guiding defensibility strategy, and resolving complex data issues.

For the first time, the eDiscovery: State of the Industry Report brings together leading ALSPs, in a collaboration between L.E.K. Consulting and DLTA, to share insights drawn from aggregated data, analysis, and perspectives representing thousands of matters. The report aims to provide the industry with an end-to-end view of discovery workflows, AI and technology adoption, and the expanding role of ALSPs.

Highlights

• Discovery workflows are non-linear and iterative, with ALSPs responsible for end-to-end execution across 500–550 petabytes of managed data, while actively managing 2.5–3x additional unseen data beyond hosted platforms.
• ALSPs are leading AI adoption for the industry, collectively piloting and deploying nearly 100 AI tools across the EDRM in 2025.
• ALSPs are playing a greater strategic advisory role often before matters even begin, guiding information governance, early scoping, and case strategy to improve downstream work steps.
• Variability across legal workflows, data environments, and client risk tolerances structurally impedes the emergence of a single end-to-end technology solution; ALSPs remain the operating layer that preserves chain of custody and ensures legal defensibility for clients.

Fill in the form to access your copy of eDiscovery: State of the Industry — The Shift Toward Advisory-Led, AI-Enabled Execution.

For more information, please contact us.

L.E.K. Consulting is a registered trademark of L.E.K. Consulting LLC. All other products and brands mentioned in this document are properties of their respective owners. © 2026 L.E.K. Consulting LLC

L.E.K. Consulting’s latest Education Pulse Survey examines how U.S. K-12 districts and higher education institutions are resetting priorities as pandemic-era funding rolls off and regulatory conditions remain fluid. Drawing on responses from nearly 200 administrators nationwide, the analysis captures how leaders are navigating enrollment pressure, policy uncertainty and shifting budget expectations.

The findings show that overall budgets have been more resilient than anticipated, but uncertainty is slowing purchasing and investment decisions. In K-12, districts are protecting teacher pay, core curriculum, special education and student safety, while applying tighter scrutiny to supplemental programs.

Student mental health and workforce retention now rank among the most pressing system-wide challenges.

In higher education, leaders are prioritizing instruction, academic support and enrollment stabilization, with regulatory developments shaping the timing of major investments.

Across both sectors, AI adoption is emerging as a measured but growing area of focus, led by practical, near-term use cases rather than large-scale transformation.

Download the full analysis to explore the detailed findings and understand how education leaders across the U.S. are reallocating spend for the year ahead.

L.E.K. Consulting is a registered trademark of L.E.K. Consulting LLC. All other products and brands mentioned in this document are properties of their respective owners. © 2026 L.E.K. Consulting LLC