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Legal AI Index

Tracking AI adoption across law firms. Updated periodically with data from the industry’s most credible surveys and reports.

69%

of legal professionals use AI for work

Up from 31% in 2025

46%

of firms have implemented AI firm-wide

58% for firms with 20+ lawyers

32.5

working days saved per year per lawyer

For those saving 5 hrs/week

3×

more likely to grow revenue with AI adoption

Clio Legal Trends 2025

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Donna

Donna Research

Last updated Apr 16

AI adoption among legal professionals has more than doubled in one year. As of March 2026, 69% of legal professionals report using generative AI tools for work, up from 31% in 2025. Firm-wide implementation lags behind individual adoption at 46%, though firms with more than 20 lawyers reach 58%.

Organisation-wide AI usage across professional services hit 40% in 2026, up from 22% the year before. Legal is no longer a laggard — it’s moving at the same pace as the rest of the professional services economy.

What lawyers use AI for

The most common applications are drafting correspondence (58%), general research (58%), brainstorming (54%), and document summarisation (47%). Legal research using AI-driven analytics sits at 35%.

Nearly one-third of legal professionals use generative AI daily. Another 31% use it several times a week. Among firm lawyers specifically, 47% report using AI at least three times per week.

A notable shift: only 40% of legal professionals use legal-specific AI solutions, down from 58% in 2024. The gap is being filled by general-purpose tools — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity — which are faster to adopt and often free to start.

Time and productivity

62% of legal professionals report saving 6–20% of their weekly time due to AI. For those saving five hours per week, that equates to 32.5 full working days reclaimed each year.

The gains are not evenly distributed. In one documented case, AI reduced the time for associates to draft complaint responses from 16 hours to 3–4 minutes. But 90% of firms interviewed by Harvard researchers report that total hours worked remain stable — lawyers reallocate time toward higher-value strategic work rather than reducing output.

32% of legal professionals attribute an 11–20% increase in revenue directly to AI adoption. Firms with a visible AI strategy are 3.9× more likely to see ROI compared to those with ad-hoc approaches.

The trust gap

Adoption is high. Trust is not. 75% of lawyers cite accuracy as their primary concern about AI, and the data supports their caution.

General-purpose LLMs hallucinate 58–88% of the time in legal contexts. Legal-specific tools using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) reduce that to 15–34%, but the gap remains significant. Even the best-performing tools achieve accuracy rates of approximately 78–81%.

By 2025, researchers documented over 200 instances of AI-generated fabricated citations reaching courts, leading to at least 66 sanctions. Models often express high confidence in fabricated outputs, meaning tone is not a reliable indicator of accuracy.

Only 18% of professional services organisations track AI ROI. The gap between enthusiasm and evidence is the defining tension in legal AI today.

By jurisdiction

United Kingdom

89% of legal professionals in the UK and Ireland report using AI tools. But only 27% of firms have embedded AI widely across their organisations. Integration into existing workflows is the leading barrier for 37% of professionals.

Fixed-fee billing is now the dominant model (53%), while hourly billing has declined to 32%. Top 100 firms expect AI to reduce chargeable hours by approximately 16%. 17% of firms still lack a formal AI policy.

Australia

Over two-thirds of Australian legal practitioners use or plan to use generative AI. Confidence in AI use has reached 90%, up from 75% in 2023/24.

Adoption patterns vary by firm size: small firms adopt for agility, mid-sized firms for growth, and large firms for scale and risk management. Top concerns remain hallucinations (39%), data confidentiality (36%), and accidental bias (33%).

The tool landscape

Law firms are adopting a portfolio approach, deploying multiple specialised tools rather than a single vendor. Large firms report an average of 18 live AI tools. 72% have built internal chatbots via API; only 16% have commissioned custom LLMs.

The market segments clearly by firm size. Enterprise and BigLaw lean toward Harvey AI for contract analysis and due diligence, alongside Westlaw Precision AI for litigation. Mid-size firms favour Lexis+ AI and CoCounsel. Solo and small firms rely on CoCounsel, Clio Manage AI, and Spellbook for contract drafting.

82% of legal professionals plan to increase their use of AI over the next 12 months. The question is no longer whether firms will adopt AI, but whether they will do it with a strategy or by accident.

Methodology

The Donna Legal AI Index aggregates data from the industry’s most credible public surveys and reports. We do not generate primary data. Instead, we collect, cross-reference, and synthesise findings from multiple sources to provide a coherent picture of AI adoption in legal.

Our primary sources include the 8am Report (n=1,200+ legal professionals), Thomson Reuters AI in Professional Services Report (n=1,500+ professionals), Clio Legal Trends Report (aggregated data from 100,000+ legal professionals), Wolters Kluwer Future Ready Lawyer Survey (n=810 lawyers across 10 countries), and the ABA Legal Technology Survey Report (n=800+ attorneys).

When sources report different figures for similar metrics, we present the range and cite each source. We favour recency, sample size, and methodological transparency when choosing which figure to highlight.

This index is updated periodically as new data becomes available. All figures are sourced from publicly available reports and academic research. We encourage readers to consult the original sources for full methodological detail.

Sources

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    Future Ready Lawyer Survey Wolters Kluwer, 2026
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    The Impact of AI on Law Firms' Business Models Harvard Center on the Legal Profession, 2025

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