The profession that struggles to figure out a PDF is apparently the heaviest power users of artificial intelligence in the corporate world.
Harmonic Security, which sells AI governance software, analyzed 1,935,247 classified AI-session minutes across its enterprise client base and broke the results out by department. Legal and governance finished first at 19.5 percent of all AI hours. Go to Market — sales, marketing, business development, the entire revenue organization — came in second at 17.7. Design and development took third at 13.3.
If anything, the raw percentage undersells it, because those are department totals rather than per-head numbers. Go to Market at a company big enough to buy governance software would generally include an order of magnitude more people than a legal department. Corporations are always scaling back on legal, viewing it as a cost sink rather than a “useful” part of the business. Whatever the per-capita number is, legal must be crushing it.
The financial and organizational pressures on legal departments likely fuel their AI usage. In-house lawyers are the only lawyers in America with no structural reason to resent efficiency. Every hour a legal department saves is an hour it doesn’t have to buy at $2,500 a pop. There’s no billable target to hit and no realization rate to protect. An in-house lawyer’s incentives and the promise of AI point in precisely the same direction.
The Harbor/CLOC law department survey found GCs projecting less outside counsel spend and using AI as leverage in fee negotiations. In-house counsel told a Legal Geek panel that they want to keep as much work inside as they can and that AI finally gives them a realistic shot at this. Harmonic’s report converts those projections into measured behavior.
Meanwhile — and firms should read this part twice — 8am’s numbers last week found small firms billing more hours per case than before AI arrived. So be wary that AI might not really make matters more efficient, it might instead be opening up lawyers to do more work than before.
Harmonic also found that Legal runs 67 percent of its AI hours through ChatGPT, which the study notes is the largest single function-tool concentration anywhere in the dataset. Claude takes 18 percent, Copilot 9, Gemini 4, Perplexity 1. The low number for Perplexity reflects the fact that the data is several months old, so we can’t tell what Perplexity’s leap into the legal space might have done to usage.
Speaking of Claude, “Claude’s profile is different,” the report says, “it handles 41% of Strategy work and 40% of Finance, reflecting its stronger position in tasks requiring sustained analytical reasoning.” (emphasis added). Yo, Legal! Are you going to take that “you’re not doing sustained analytical reasoning” shade lying down?
Legal is also, by a distance, the best-behaved department in the study, with only 4 percent of its AI time running on free personal accounts. All told, Legal accounts for roughly a third of all enterprise-plan hours. Though it’s not surprising that lawyers respect the dangers of shadow IT more than a bunch of salespeople.
Harmonic CEO Alastair Paterson threads it this way: “Legal is to be commended for largely using enterprise-tools but even the small amount of personal use we identified is a risk.”
But, hey, let’s not dwell on the negatives right now. Congratulations to all the in-house lawyers finally finding the tool that they can leverage. The rest of the industry may struggle with technology, but you’re ahead of the curve. Or at least 96 percent of you are… we see you 4 percent on your personal accounts!
Earlier: Biglaw’s Worst Enemy Isn’t AI, It’s Clients Using AI to Stop Paying Them
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.
The post In-House Lawyers Are The Biggest AI Users appeared first on Above the Law.
The profession that struggles to figure out a PDF is apparently the heaviest power users of artificial intelligence in the corporate world.
Harmonic Security, which sells AI governance software, analyzed 1,935,247 classified AI-session minutes across its enterprise client base and broke the results out by department. Legal and governance finished first at 19.5 percent of all AI hours. Go to Market — sales, marketing, business development, the entire revenue organization — came in second at 17.7. Design and development took third at 13.3.
If anything, the raw percentage undersells it, because those are department totals rather than per-head numbers. Go to Market at a company big enough to buy governance software would generally include an order of magnitude more people than a legal department. Corporations are always scaling back on legal, viewing it as a cost sink rather than a “useful” part of the business. Whatever the per-capita number is, legal must be crushing it.
The financial and organizational pressures on legal departments likely fuel their AI usage. In-house lawyers are the only lawyers in America with no structural reason to resent efficiency. Every hour a legal department saves is an hour it doesn’t have to buy at $2,500 a pop. There’s no billable target to hit and no realization rate to protect. An in-house lawyer’s incentives and the promise of AI point in precisely the same direction.
The Harbor/CLOC law department survey found GCs projecting less outside counsel spend and using AI as leverage in fee negotiations. In-house counsel told a Legal Geek panel that they want to keep as much work inside as they can and that AI finally gives them a realistic shot at this. Harmonic’s report converts those projections into measured behavior.
Meanwhile — and firms should read this part twice — 8am’s numbers last week found small firms billing more hours per case than before AI arrived. So be wary that AI might not really make matters more efficient, it might instead be opening up lawyers to do more work than before.
Harmonic also found that Legal runs 67 percent of its AI hours through ChatGPT, which the study notes is the largest single function-tool concentration anywhere in the dataset. Claude takes 18 percent, Copilot 9, Gemini 4, Perplexity 1. The low number for Perplexity reflects the fact that the data is several months old, so we can’t tell what Perplexity’s leap into the legal space might have done to usage.
Speaking of Claude, “Claude’s profile is different,” the report says, “it handles 41% of Strategy work and 40% of Finance, reflecting its stronger position in tasks requiring sustained analytical reasoning.” (emphasis added). Yo, Legal! Are you going to take that “you’re not doing sustained analytical reasoning” shade lying down?
Legal is also, by a distance, the best-behaved department in the study, with only 4 percent of its AI time running on free personal accounts. All told, Legal accounts for roughly a third of all enterprise-plan hours. Though it’s not surprising that lawyers respect the dangers of shadow IT more than a bunch of salespeople.
Harmonic CEO Alastair Paterson threads it this way: “Legal is to be commended for largely using enterprise-tools but even the small amount of personal use we identified is a risk.”
But, hey, let’s not dwell on the negatives right now. Congratulations to all the in-house lawyers finally finding the tool that they can leverage. The rest of the industry may struggle with technology, but you’re ahead of the curve. Or at least 96 percent of you are… we see you 4 percent on your personal accounts!
Earlier: Biglaw’s Worst Enemy Isn’t AI, It’s Clients Using AI to Stop Paying Them
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.
