# Law Firm AI Adoption Survey Data: What the 2025-2026 Reports Show

> Thomson Reuters and Wolters Kluwer surveyed thousands of legal professionals in 2025 and 2026. Adoption nearly doubled year over year, but most firms still lack a visible AI strategy — and most say they are falling short of AI's real value.

*Published 2026-07-10 · By Legal AI Insight Research Desk*

The headline numbers
Legal generative AI usage nearly doubled year over year — from 14% to 26% of legal organizations — according to Thomson Reuters' 2025 Generative AI in Professional Services Report. A separate Wolters Kluwer poll found 92% of lawyers now use at least one AI tool daily. Yet Thomson Reuters' 2026 Future of Professionals Report found 91% of organizations say they are still falling short of AI's potential value, and only 22% of law firms report having a visible AI strategy in place.

Two of the legal industry's most closely watched annual research programs — Thomson Reuters' Future of Professionals series and Wolters Kluwer's Future Ready Lawyer Survey — released fresh data in 2025 and 2026 on how quickly law firms are actually adopting artificial intelligence, what attorneys use it for day to day, and how they feel about it. The topline story is consistent across both: adoption is accelerating fast, but a strategy and measurement gap now separates firms that report real benefit from firms that are simply using more tools without a clear plan.

## How fast is AI adoption growing at law firms?

Thomson Reuters surveyed 1,702 professionals across legal, tax, accounting, audit, corporate risk, fraud, and government functions for its 2025 [Generative AI in Professional Services Report](https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en/press-releases/2025/april/from-incubation-to-integration-generative-ai-adoption-nearly-doubles-as-professional-services-reach-crossroads), with legal professionals making up roughly 41% of respondents. It found that 26% of legal organizations were actively using generative AI in 2025, up from just 14% the year before — the strongest adoption growth of any profession surveyed. Only 15% of law firm respondents said generative AI was currently central to their workflow, but 78% believed it would become central within five years.

Wolters Kluwer's companion research, the 2026 [Future Ready Lawyer Survey](https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/know/future-ready-lawyer-2026), asked a broader question — any AI tool, not just generative AI platforms — of 810 lawyers in law firms and corporate legal departments across the United States, China, and nine European countries. It found 92% of respondents now use at least one AI tool in their daily work, with 62% saving between 6% and 20% of their weekly working time as a result. That fieldwork was conducted in August 2025 and published in March 2026, making it one of the most current large-sample looks at day-to-day legal AI use available.

## What are attorneys actually using AI for?

The use-case data is remarkably consistent across sources. Thomson Reuters' 2025 report found the top three generative AI applications among legal professionals were document review (77%), legal research (74%), and document summarization (74%) — the traditionally labor-intensive tasks that AI vendors, including Thomson Reuters' own CoCounsel platform, have targeted first. Nearly 70% of law firm respondents who use generative AI reported doing so at least weekly, indicating routine rather than occasional use.

Top generative AI use cases among legal professionals (Thomson Reuters, 2025)
Use caseShare of legal professionals using AI for this task

Document review77%
Legal research74%
Document summarization74%
Weekly-or-more usage among gen AI users~70%

## How do attorneys feel about AI — excitement or anxiety?

Sentiment shifted noticeably positive between 2024 and 2025. Thomson Reuters found hesitancy was the dominant attitude toward generative AI in 2024, cited by 35% of legal respondents. By 2025, excitement (27%) and hopefulness (28%) together outweighed hesitancy, which fell to 24%. As [LawNext reported](https://www.lawnext.com/2025/04/thomson-reuters-survey-over-95-of-legal-professionals-expect-gen-ai-to-become-central-to-workflow-within-five-years.html), more than 95% of surveyed professionals expect generative AI to become central to their workflow within five years. Raghu Ramanathan, president of Legal Professionals at Thomson Reuters, framed the shift as evolutionary rather than disruptive, describing the legal sector as embracing generative AI \"not as a threat but as an ally.\"

Wolters Kluwer's 2026 data tells a similar story: 61% of respondents expressed growing confidence in their organization's ability to adapt business practices, service models, and pricing to AI-driven change, and 60% expected their firm's AI investment to keep increasing over the next three years. About half of respondents reported their organization had already seen additional revenue since adopting AI tools.

## Does having a real AI strategy actually change outcomes?

This is where the two surveys converge most sharply. Thomson Reuters' 2025 Future of Professionals research, drawing on responses from roughly 1,000 law firm professionals, found that firms with a clear AI strategy were 3.9 times more likely to report experiencing benefits from AI and nearly twice as likely to see revenue growth, compared with firms adopting AI tools without a strategic plan. Yet only 22% of law firm respondents said their firm had a visible AI strategy, and 32% said their firm was moving too slowly on adoption overall.

Thomson Reuters' newer 2026 Future of Professionals Report, covering 1,816 professionals across law, tax, audit, and related fields in 62 countries, sharpened that finding into what the report calls an \"AI value gap\": 91% of organizations said they were falling short of AI's potential value, even as 74% of professionals reported using AI tools several times a week. Organizations with a named AI strategy were far more likely — 66% versus 22% — to report AI meeting or exceeding value expectations than organizations without one, as [LawNext's coverage of the report](https://www.lawnext.com/2026/06/thomson-reuters-future-of-professionals-report-warns-of-widening-gap-between-ai-adoption-and-ai-value.html) detailed.

## What is holding firms back from getting more value out of AI?

The barriers identified across both surveys are structural rather than about willingness to try new tools. Thomson Reuters found only 41% of law firms had established generative AI governance policies, just 40% offered any formal AI training to staff, and only 20% were measuring return on investment on their AI tools at all. Wolters Kluwer's respondents cited ethical and data-privacy concerns (39%), inadequate training (39%), and resistance to change (35%) as their top implementation challenges.

Taken together, the surveys describe a legal industry past the early-experimentation phase and into a period where usage is broad but uneven in payoff. As [Attorney at Work summarized](https://www.attorneyatwork.com/the-ai-adoption-divide-dominates-the-2025-future-of-professionals-report/) in its analysis of the 2025 Future of Professionals Report, the widening divide is no longer between firms that use AI and firms that don't — nearly all now do to some degree — but between firms that have translated adoption into a governed, measured strategy and firms still treating AI as a collection of individual tools rather than an organizational capability.

## Sources

1. [Generative AI Adoption Nearly Doubles as Professional Services Reach Crossroads](https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en/press-releases/2025/april/from-incubation-to-integration-generative-ai-adoption-nearly-doubles-as-professional-services-reach-crossroads)
2. [Future of Professionals Report 2025](https://www.thomsonreuters.com/content/dam/ewp-m/documents/thomsonreuters/en/pdf/reports/future-of-professionals-report-2025.pdf)
3. [2025 GenAI Report: Executive Summary for Legal Professionals](https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/blog/genai-report-executive-summary-for-legal-professionals-tri/)
4. [Thomson Reuters Survey: Over 95% of Legal Professionals Expect Gen AI to Become Central to Workflow Within Five Years](https://www.lawnext.com/2025/04/thomson-reuters-survey-over-95-of-legal-professionals-expect-gen-ai-to-become-central-to-workflow-within-five-years.html)
5. [Thomson Reuters 'Future of Professionals' Report Warns of Widening Gap Between AI Adoption and AI Value](https://www.lawnext.com/2026/06/thomson-reuters-future-of-professionals-report-warns-of-widening-gap-between-ai-adoption-and-ai-value.html)
6. [The Future Ready Lawyer Report: Building Confidence in an AI Era](https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/know/future-ready-lawyer-2026)
7. [The AI Adoption Divide Dominates the 2025 Future of Professionals Report](https://www.attorneyatwork.com/the-ai-adoption-divide-dominates-the-2025-future-of-professionals-report/)

---
Source: https://legalaiinsight.com/industry-news/legal-ai-adoption-survey
Index: https://legalaiinsight.com/llms.txt · Full text: https://legalaiinsight.com/llms-full.txt