The Brief:
Legora’s new ROI report finds 97% of in-house legal teams respond to stakeholders faster with AI, and 87% call it essential to daily work.
The bigger question: if in-house teams get faster and more confident, will they still need law firms as much as before?
Legora has crunched the numbers on what AI is actually doing for in-house legal teams, and the results are hard to ignore.
The Legora ROI Report is based on interviews conducted by independent analyst Ari Kaplan with 30 in-house legal leaders across nine countries — all Legora customers. The cohort wasn’t small players either. Every participant works at a company pulling in over US$1bn in annual revenue, 60% at companies above US$10bn, and 57% at businesses with more than 10,000 staff.
The findings
Across the board, respondents credited Legora with concrete gains. Here are the figures:
97% respond to stakeholders faster or much faster.
77% report quicker project turnaround.
90% say ramp-up time on new matters has dropped.
71% feel more confident in their work quality.
57% caught a supplier agreement issue they’d have otherwise missed.
Some said that work that used to take days now takes hours, and work that used to take hours now takes minutes.
It’s not just about speed. 80% now get more done in the same time, 87% are spending more time on higher-value work, and 53% are supporting extra business units off the back of it.
Legora’s findings line up with a broader trend.
Earlier this year, research firm Gartner predicted that in-house legal tech budgets are set to double by 2028, as platforms like Harvey, Legora, GC AI and Thomson Reuters CoCounsel keep delivering measurable gains on routine legal work. And by 2029, Gartner expects around 50% of contract reviews to be handled by self-service systems, with only one in 10 escalated to a human.
The fallout
If in-house teams are getting faster, more confident and more self-sufficient on AI, the obvious next question is why would they keep sending as much work to outside counsel?
It seems like most law firms haven’t yet caught up to that question. Most are still billing like nothing’s changed, even as clients get a front-row seat to what AI-assisted work should actually cost.
Axiom recently found that just 6% of law firms charge less for AI-assisted work. 58% haven’t cut rates at all. 34% are charging more for AI-enhanced work than they did for the traditional version.
That’s a hard sell when clients can see the efficiency gains for themselves. Once a client’s own legal team is delivering work in hours instead of days, watching a law firm bill the same rate for AI-assisted work doesn’t sit well.
Some firms are starting to adjust. Keypoint Law is one of the only firms to ditch the billable hour entirely. Meanwhile, DLA Piper’s Australia arm has introduced a new performance measure that prioritises fees generated over hours logged, so lawyers aren’t disincentivised from working faster with AI.
The pivot
If process work is becoming a harder sell, it’s time for firms to pivot to something AI can’t easily touch: strategy.
The market’s landed on a rough consensus that the future of law is high-judgment, human-only advice — the kind of work resistant to automation. That shift is already playing out across the Aussie legal market.
Mid-tier firms Gadens, Maddocks and Hall & Wilcox have all gone on hiring sprees over the past six months, poaching senior talent from bigger rivals to chase work that used to sit firmly with the top-tier.
The boldest move came from what used to be Thomson Geer. The firm split in two: Thomsons, chasing blue-chip corporate strategy work, and Faculti, running procedural matters like insurance and leasing through its own AI platform.
Strategy work might survive the AI shift. But if in-house teams keep getting faster and more self-sufficient, will it be enough to keep firms as profitable as they are today?