In numbers: AI adoption among legal teams

Clear, credible data on the benefits of in-house legal AI can be hard to find. To help, we’ve gathered useful figures from reputable sources including Gartner, Thomson Reuters, Wolters Kluwer and our own research. These insights show how and where legal AI is delivering measurable value for legal departments.

Legal AI adoption in 2025

From The Future of Professionals Report 2025 by Thomson Reuters, based on 2,275 responses from legal, risk, and compliance professionals:

• 53% of organisations are already seeing ROI from AI, largely through efficiency gains, error reduction, and faster turnaround times.
• Legal professionals expect to save 240 hours annually per person due to AI (up from 200 in 2024), worth $19,000 each. This equates to a $32 billion annual impact across US legal and tax and accounting sectors.
• Organisations with visible AI strategies are 2x more likely to see revenue growth and 3.5x more likely to unlock AI benefits.
• 80% expect AI to be transformational within five years, though only 38% expect high-impact change in 2025.
• 30% say their organisation is moving too slowly on AI adoption.
• 46% have invested in new AI technologies in the past year.
• 30% of individuals regularly use AI to generate or edit content.

A Wolters Kluwer report, AI: A game-changer for your Corporate legal department?, gives more insights into the role of AI in corporate legal departments:

• More than 70% of in-house lawyers expect technologies like AI and machine learning will impact their legal department within the next three years.
• An AI-powered Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) solution can drastically reduce contract review time. A manual review process that would typically take a few hours can be completed by AI in just two or three minutes.
• Legal departments utilising AI for contract review can spend 75% less time reviewing each contract. This means a 3-hour contract review can be condensed to 45 minutes.

Our report, The AI Governance Gap, shows how legal teams are using AI and how much understanding organisations have of the AI employees use. The report is based on interviews with 150 General Counsels, in April 2025.

• AI adoption by function: Operations (83%), marketing and sales (80%), IT (80%), legal and compliance (77%).
• 90% of organisations now use AI in day-to-day operations.
• Only 18% have a fully implemented AI governance framework.
• 1 in 14 firms don't know what AI tools are in use.
• Just 31% require formal approval for all AI use; only 24% say usage rules are consistently followed.
• Among mid-sized firms (200 - 499 employees), 29% lack visibility into AI usage.
• Among larger firms (2,500+ employees), 32% have a complete governance framework; only 6% of smaller firms have fully implemented AI policies, compared to 30% of large firms.

Looking ahead 

According to Gartner’s report, 3 Steps Legal Should Take Before Adopting Generative AI, Weston Wicks, 2024:

• The legal tech market is projected to increase by 60% by 2027, largely driven by GenAI investments.
• The share of the legal budget spent in-house is expected to grow by 15% by 2027.
• The share of legal requests answered by self-service is expected to rise from low single digits to at least 20% by 2027.
• Legal, risk, and compliance departments anticipate the highest productivity gains (27.3%) compared to any other department from GenAI over the next 12 to 18 months.

LEGALFLY’s quantifiable impact

LEGALFLY’s legal AI delivers measurable results across legal functions. It always anonymises sensitive information in text, images, and PDFs before processing.

• A large insurance company in Luxembourg saved over 3,000 hours on their path to DORA compliance using LEGALFLY. By automating the review of thousands of supplier agreements, LEGALFLY reduced turnaround time from weeks to just a few days. Watch the webinar on this.
• Agristo, a leading producer of frozen potato products, cut contract review time from two hours to 15 minutes. This gave the legal team back oversight without slowing operations, while enabling managers to handle contracts independently with more confidence.
• Vandelanotte, a Belgian advisory firm, built a digital lawyer platform powered by LEGALFLY to give clients 24/7 access to contract drafting and review. This improved both internal efficiency for legal and tax teams and external access to legal services.
• ECS, a transport and logistics operator, cut document analysis time by 50%: from up to eight hours per contract to just a few. LEGALFLY enabled finance and admin teams to bulk-process large volumes and increase capacity without adding headcount. They also automated insurance policy analysis, removing the need for manual review and translation.
• Duvel, a global leader in specialty beers, was able to cut the time taken to respond to routine legal queries from 1 day to 20 minutes by using LEGALFLY to extract key information from long legal documents.

Next steps: Choosing the right legal AI matters

If you’ve made the case and secured buy-in, the next step is selecting a platform. Not all solutions are equal. LEGALFLY is built specifically for legal work. It’s AI-native, not retrofitted. It anonymises sensitive data before processing, integrates directly with your workflows in the tool you use like Microsoft Word, and delivers results that are fast, explainable, and secure. If you're looking for a platform that’s trusted by legal teams across sectors, LEGALFLY has proven it delivers.