Lawyers are not known for embracing change.  As an American Bar Association article put it “Attorneys tend to be risk-averse with a tendency toward perfectionism, which makes tech tools look less desirable.  There’s also a strong emphasis on tradition and precedent in the legal industry which naturally makes it harder to embrace new trends.”

But all that began to change in 2022 when OpenAI released ChatGPT 3.5 (see Part 3), and lawyers saw its potential to help in their work.  Since then, AI use has grown rapidly, as shown in four recent surveys.   

According to Clio’s latest Legal Trends Report, a survey of 1702 US legal professionals found that “79% use artificial intelligence in their firms.”  Another survey of 1,300 legal professionals conducted by the company 8AM found that, “Nearly three-quarters of legal professionals (69%) now report personally using general-purpose AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude for work-related purposes… For a profession historically cautious about new technology, that rate of adoption represents a dramatic increase from the… 31% we found in [our] 2025 report.”  Similarly a third survey from Law 360 found that “Seventy percent of attorneys at law firms report using artificial intelligence at least once a week as part of their jobs.”  Finally, in the fourth survey, Wolters Kluwer  interviewed 810 lawyers in 11 countries and found “Over 90% of legal professionals now use at least one AI tool in their daily work.”

Summing up the current situation, the latest report from the American Bar Association’s Task Force on Law and Artificial Intelligence concluded that “as the transformative power of the technology has become more widely known, the conversation has shifted from whether to use the AI technology to how to use it… Early adoption has been limited largely to low-risk, routine tasks where the benefits are clear and the risks are manageable [such as] “summarizing, extracting insights from unstructured data, drafting simple communications like emails or short memos, and drafting client alerts.” 

Most law firms had actually been using AI years before chatbots emerged, especially in the areas of legal research and e-discovery.  In 1973, the company now named LexisNexis introduced the first computerized product to search the legal literature for precedents and more. Competitors soon followed, all built around traditional rule-based computer programming. LexisNexis added AI features in 2017, and maintains its dominant position in this market with over “five million [users]… in over 175 countries.”

E-discovery refers to the process of efficiently analyzing computer emails, texts and more to use as evidence in lawsuits.  It too started with traditional rule-based computer programming and later began adding AI features.

But when people talk about today’s AI legal revolution, they usually are not talking about the features of widely accepted tools for research and e-discovery.  They are usually talking about general purpose tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude that use machine learning (see Part 2) to create new content.  The most advanced firms are often talking about legal-specific AI tools that have been customized for a particular legal purpose and/or for a single firm.  Legal-specific AI has many advantages including the ability to host products on a law firm’s internal servers (keeping all private information off the internet) and the ability to load all of a firm’s documents into a firm-specific training database.  The power and sophistication possible with customized products like these dwarfs anything a lawyer could do with ChatGPT.

Some lawyers have jumped into these sophisticated AI programs with both feet.  For one example, see the X post by Neil Katyal, a partner at Milbank and a Professor of Law at Georgetown.  His post describes how he used legal-specific AI to help win a 2025 Supreme Court case which “Legal scholars… and some of my own colleagues [had] said was impossible [to win].”  The product he used was developed by the AI company Harvey (named after Harvey Specter, a fictional partner in the TV hit Suits.).  The program was “trained on every question every [Supreme Court] Justice has asked in oral argument for 25 years, and everything they’ve ever written… Harvey predicted many of the questions the Justices asked — sometimes almost word for word” and that helped Katyal to win the case. (For a more detailed account, see Katyal’s 18 minute TED talk “What really won the trillion-dollar Supreme Court case?”)

Why is the use of AI now spreading so rapidly among lawyers?  The answer is simple: it saves time.  According to Clio’s latest Legal Trends Report “86% of heavy users say the technology has eased their work.”

But it can take considerable time and money to reap these benefits, including redesigning workflow, and increasing training and change management.  There have also been several widely publicized cases in which lawyers used AI in their research, and submitted “hallucinations” of legal precedents.  In one recent example, “Lawyers for Sullivan & Cromwell… one of the oldest and most prestigious law firms in the country … apologized for submitting a court filing that had fake citations created by artificial intelligence.”  This despite the fact that “Sullivan & Cromwell requires its lawyers to take a training course before gaining access to AI tools… to ‘trust nothing and verify everything.’”  In another, “A federal judge in Mississippi has punished all four lawyers on opposing sides in a civil trial and canceled the proceedings after some of them, relying on artificial intelligence, cited fake legal cases in court filings.”

Problems like this have been rare to date but very costly in terms of public perceptions. As the old cliché says, you won’t get a second chance to make a first impression. 

As a result, an American Bar Association article entitled Understanding the Legal AI Landscape offers this advice:  when firms first get serious about the topic, they “must navigate a complex and evolving AI landscape to identify the right tools for their needs.”  The key to success, the article continues is to “start with AI tools that address specific challenges, and expand gradually to maximize efficiency while mitigating risks like bias, hallucinations, and data privacy concerns.” 

And then there’s the elephant in the room: if lawyers who bill by the hour get more efficient, their revenue will go down. 

When AI saves time for paralegals, associates, and partners, what are they supposed to do with it?  Companies that sell legal AI products sometimes paint an optimistic picture in which no one will be laid off and this newly available time can be used for marketing and improved service.  Other experts suggest that greater efficiency can produce greater profits if firms switch from hourly billing to fixed fees and value-based pricing.  Still others believe that, as consultant James Markham put it, “there’s a misplaced optimism in fixed fees and value based pricing as the silver bullet… a likely course of events is that prices come down as clients can take their pick from an increasing number of AI-ified firms, as well as using the same tools for themselves.”

On a broader scale, as a Thomson Reuters report put it, “AI may cause momentous, industry-wide shifts. Many professionals say their organizations are still struggling to determine the return on investment (ROI) of AI tools… only 18% of respondents say their organizations collect metrics around ROI from AI. Of those, most metrics are internally focused, involving such areas as cost savings or employee usage, rather than business-focused metrics such as client satisfaction or amount of business generated.”

According to many experts, the next step in the legal AI revolution will be an increasing reliance on AI agents, which “perform autonomous tasks on behalf of the user or another system… [They are] focused on decisions as opposed to creating… content [and they don’t] solely rely on human prompts nor require human oversight.”   But that’s another story, which will be covered in a future post.

With all these rapidly moving developments, should financially conservative law firms wait for the dust to settle before they invest in AI?  Absolutely not.

Casey Flaherty, co-founder of LexFusion put it this way:  “Failure to start down the path of using GenAI is a terrible plan. [Note: Generative AI or Gen AI refers to products like ChatGPT that create new content.] But… GenAI is not magic… it is a path, not a teleportation device. There is a staggering amount of work to be done to realize GenAI’s potential, especially in an enterprise environment.”

Despite the barriers, AI is becoming a vital part of legal work.  Lawyers who expect to survive in an ever more competitive market don’t have much choice.  As Paul Saunders, the Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at Canadian law firm Stewart McKelvey summed it up: “AI will not replace lawyers, but lawyers that use AI will replace those that don’t”

For background see the section on how AI works