New report shows that most lawyers don’t use AI to manage their growing workloads.
Practice Technology
Most lawyers aren’t using AI to address growing workloads, new report says
January 16, 2025, 10:15 am CST
A new study has found that most legal professionals are not yet using artificial intelligence to address increasing workload challenges. (Image from Shutterstock)
A new study has found that most legal professionals are not yet using artificial intelligence to address increasing workload challenges.
On Tuesday, Washington, D.C.-based legal services company Consilio released its annual report, Beyond the Gridlock: Overcoming the Challenges of Modern Legal Work, which found that 48% of respondents ranked overwhelming work volume as their most significant challenge.
While 46% of respondents agreed that AI will shape the future of the legal industry, only 32% of law firms and 20% of in-house legal teams said they are deploying or planning to deploy AI in their work.
“Humans will not be able to keep up with the growing workload volume much longer,” said Michael Pontrelli, managing director of global strategic client experience at Consilio, in a Jan. 14 press release. To keep up, legal departments and firms must develop a plan for incorporating AI. According to its report, this includes prioritizing contract management, regulatory compliance and risk management, information governance and records retention, and legal project management solutions.
“We’ve continued to see the sheer scale of workload forcing many legal professionals to focus on fixing the here and now, which our research quantitatively reinforces,” Pontrelli said in the press release. “To enable them to allocate their efforts and resources toward innovative new technologies that can one day lessen their workload, right now, respondents are focused on smaller reinventions of how they structure their daily work.”
According to Consilio’s report, 31% of respondents ranked improving operational efficiency as one of their top challenges. And specifically related to data, 32% said document review quality and efficiency was their biggest challenge.
Law.com has additional coverage.
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