Most lawyers aren’t using AI to address growing workloads, new report says
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 pace, legal departments and law firms must develop a strategy for incorporating AI.”
For the report, Consilio surveyed 212 legal, risk and compliance professionals in corporate law departments and firms from Asia and the Middle East, Australia, the United Kingdom and Europe, and the United States in July and August 2024.
Despite increasing opportunities to leverage AI and other large-scale innovations, Consilio found that 60% of respondents are focusing on smaller technology projects to relieve workload pressures. 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.
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