A survey of professionals reveals the impact of legal work, clients, concerns, and future roles

Statistics from the Future of Professional Report

• 77% of respondents believe AI will have a high or transformational impact on their work by the next five years. That’s an increase of 10 percentage points over the 2023 report’s responses. 

• 72% of legal professionals surveyed in the report view AI as a force for good in their profession.

• Half of law firm respondents cite exploring and implementing AI as their highest priority. In addition, they believe AI could help address other priorities, such as increased customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.

Over the past few years, legal professionals have become less wary of artificial intelligence (AI). Indeed, they are increasingly embracing AI as a transformative force, becoming more and more optimistic about the positive impact it can have on their practices. 

According to the professionals surveyed in Thomson Reuters’ 2024 Future of Professionals Report, AI is transforming the legal profession by automating routine tasks and boosting lawyer productivity through AI-powered tools that handle document review, legal research, and contract analysis, while showing that AI could save lawyers 4 hours per week while generating $100,000 in new billable time per lawyer annually.

As they look ahead to 2025 and beyond, it’s clear that legal professionals will need to stay on top of new developments in AI like, specifically, generative AI (GenAI) in areas like legal work, clients, concerns, and future roles.

Impact on legal work

Legal professionals who wish to perform due diligence on the use of AI in their practices need to do so thoughtfully and rigorously. If they don’t do so, they might not maximize the benefits this emerging technology can provide.  

The benefits are significant, with the potential to transform the way legal professionals deliver value and service to clients. For one thing, AI is expected to significantly boost lawyer productivity through time savings, particularly through the automation of repetitive but necessary tasks that currently can take up a great deal of a professional’s workflow—but don’t need to. These tasks include drafting standard documents such as contracts. For instance, an AI tool can automate the complex process of searching, cutting, pasting, deleting, and editing to make drafting and analysis of contracts much faster and less tedious.  

It’s essential, of course, that such a tool be trustworthy. Legal professionals need to create documents that are precise and enforceable. This means that the AI they use must draw from sources developed and maintained by reputable legal experts—and be transparent about its data sources.  

In addition, AI tools developed specifically for the legal profession can conduct research on cases, precedents, and other legal topics. AI can also summarize information across many sources and platforms much more rapidly than poring through these sources “manually.” Instead, legal professionals can quickly get the information they need to put together strong cases, documents, and briefs.  

All told, the Future of Professionals Report predicts that AI could free up 4 hours of a legal professional’s time per week. For U.S. lawyers alone, the savings could translate into 266 million hours of increased productivity—approximately $100,000 in new billable time per lawyer each year.

Impact on clients

AI has been transforming how legal services deliver value to their clients, and it continues to do so. This, in turn, will require legal professionals to make changes to their traditional business models. A recent report on the legal sector client relationships from the Thomson Reuters Institute notes that technological advancements and shifting demographics are pushing law firms to adapt to evolving client demands. 

Of the legal professionals surveyed in the Future of Professionals Report, 42% want to spend more of their valuable time on expertise-driven legal work in the next five years.