In-house legal teams see AI returns in Legora study

Legora has published a report on how in-house legal teams measure returns from artificial intelligence, based on interviews with 30 legal leaders across nine countries.

The study found that AI is now embedded in the daily work of many corporate legal departments rather than confined to trial use. Among respondents, 97% said AI helped them respond to stakeholders faster, while 87% said removing it from their toolkit would disrupt day-to-day operations.

Interviewees were Legora customers and included practising lawyers, legal operations professionals and innovation leaders. The companies represented in the study each had annual revenue of more than USD $1 billion. Sixty per cent of participants worked at businesses with more than USD $10 billion in revenue, and 57% were at organisations with more than 10,000 employees.

The findings also pointed to faster turnaround across legal work. Some respondents said tasks that previously took days could now be completed in hours, while work that once took hours could be done in minutes. In the survey, 77% reported faster project turnaround and 90% said ramp-up time on new matters had decreased.

Quality and risk featured prominently in the responses. The report found that 71% of participants were more confident in the quality of their work when using AI, and 66% rated its effect on issue spotting and reducing mistakes as large or transformational.

Contract review was another area highlighted in the findings. Fifty-seven per cent of respondents said the tool helped them catch a problem they would otherwise have missed in a supplier agreement, while 40% said the same of a customer contract.

Daily work

The study suggests the technology is becoming routine inside legal departments. According to the findings, 80% of respondents said they now accomplish more in the same amount of time, 87% said they can spend more time on higher-value work, and 53% said they now support additional business units.

That increased capacity appears to be affecting how legal teams are viewed internally. Seventy-seven per cent of respondents said company leadership viewed the legal department more positively because of its use of Legora, while 70% said they could point to a concrete example of clear return on investment, most often through time savings.

According to the report, the interviews were conducted by industry analyst Ari Kaplan. They focused on how corporate legal departments assess the effects of AI on speed, quality and workload management.

The report also sets out a method for legal departments to measure AI use by creating a baseline, tracking changes over time and reporting the results to management. This reflects a broader shift in legal operations as teams try to justify technology spending with measurable outcomes rather than experimental use cases.

Legora, whose software is used by more than 100,000 legal professionals across more than 1,500 law firms and in-house legal teams in over 50 markets, is positioning the research around return on investment as scrutiny of business software spending grows. Legal departments have been under pressure to improve responsiveness to internal clients while managing outside counsel costs and increasing workloads.

For in-house teams, the findings suggest the case for AI is being framed less around novelty and more around practical workflow gains. Faster responses to stakeholders, shorter turnaround times and greater confidence in contract review were the measures respondents most clearly linked to their day-to-day work.

A quote from the report underscored that shift. "The lawyers we spoke to didn't talk about the tool. They talked about the second set of eyes that caught a clause in a supplier agreement, or the ability to answer a stakeholder's question in a meeting instead of a week later," said Max Junestrand, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Legora.

"That is the standard AI has to meet inside a legal department: it needs to be something a team can no longer imagine working without," Junestrand said.