Law firms spend more on AI but struggle to prove results

In short: Law firms are buying more AI tools to speed up legal work, but many lawyers still do not fully trust or adopt them.

What's going on

Law firm leaders are paying closer attention to AI, and spending on legal technology is expected to keep rising. Research firm Gartner predicts corporate legal departments will double their legal tech spending by 2028.

Some firms report clear time savings. Ashurst says its Ashurst Advance unit, set up in 2013, now supports about two-thirds of the firm’s legal work. The team uses tools from vendors including Harvey, Microsoft, and Relativity. Ashurst says it used “generative AI” (software that can draft and sort text, like an assistant that reads and summarizes) to review about 100,000 documents in 48 hours for a regulatory submission, a job it estimates used to take about two weeks.

More suppliers are targeting lawyers, including newer firms like Harvey and Sweden’s Legora, plus established players such as LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters. Anthropic has also released tools aimed at automating routine legal tasks, and reports say OpenAI plans legal-focused software too.

At the same time, free “open source” options are appearing, meaning the underlying code is available for others to use and modify (like sharing a recipe instead of selling a finished meal). A former lawyer in Singapore built a free legal tool called Mike OSS using Anthropic’s Claude.

What to watch

Law firms still face barriers. Factor, a legal services group, says 83 percent of lawyers have access to AI, but only 22 percent say they highly trust its outputs. Confidentiality concerns and the risk of relying on a vendor also remain. Another pressure point is that clients can buy similar tools, which could shift more work in-house and force law firms to show clearer value.

Source: Financial Times