{"id":163826,"date":"2026-09-28T13:23:28","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T21:23:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2026\/09\/28\/new-report-finds-more-lawyers-use-ai-but-for-what-tasks\/"},"modified":"2026-09-28T13:23:28","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T21:23:28","slug":"new-report-finds-more-lawyers-use-ai-but-for-what-tasks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2026\/09\/28\/new-report-finds-more-lawyers-use-ai-but-for-what-tasks\/","title":{"rendered":"New Report Finds More Lawyers Use AI, But For What Tasks?"},"content":{"rendered":"

DISCO\u2019s 2026 Legal AI Report<\/a> opens by announcing that this \u201cmay be the year the legal tech dam finally burst.\u201d Compared to the legal industry\u2019s baseline, that makes some sense, with simple adoption taking a huge leap this year. Despite the gushing imagery though, the rest of the report suggests less of a violent burst, and more of a substantial, yet controlled opening of the sluice gates at Flood Control Dam #3, allowing a managed release to gently flow downstream. <\/p>\n

The survey, run by Ari Kaplan Advisors, drew 104 respondents roughly split between firms and legal departments, and supplemented by direct interviews. Fifty-eight percent of respondents say they\u2019ve folded AI into routine processes, up from 35 percent last year. Seventy-two percent say they\u2019re confident using it for document review over manual techniques, up from 53 percent. And security fears among firm respondents fell from 68 percent to 43 percent. <\/p>\n

But what do those numbers really mean<\/em>? \u201cRoutine processes\u201d provide efficiency opportunities, but it\u2019s hardly the same as handing hefty chunks of complex tasks to AI. Using AI for document review? You have been for years! One respondent claimed they would \u201cnever go back to a manual review for first- or second-pass review,\u201d but when was the last time anyone cracked open a 2TB drive and started a manual review? We\u2019ve trusted the machines to handle eDiscovery tasks ever since we fought over seed sets. That\u2019s not a knock on the advancements in this space, rather a reminder that this is a slice of the practice that traditionally luddite lawyers have long shown a willingness to hand to the machines. <\/p>\n

And when we say security fears are down, is that because the lawyers have learned to trust the AI\u2026 or trust their external and internal limits on how it\u2019s used?<\/p>\n

Generally speaking, the use cases look like the ones we predicted: deposition summaries, chronologies, first drafts, research, a \u201csparring partner in litigation.\u201d One participant described the shift as moving \u201cfrom doing the work to directing the work,\u201d which is\u2026 how law firms work. There\u2019s just a robot doing the first-year\u2019s tasks. Which is a win for the lawyers. But the AI evangelists \u2014 and more to the point, their investors \u2014 need AI to replace human work across the board so they can fulfill their misanthropic vision of harvesting white collar workers like the human batteries from The Matrix<\/em> while melting poor people for organic pet shampoo. For them, an industry responsibly adding AI to speed its workflow by 11 percent amounts to a waking nightmare leaving them a trillion in the hole.<\/p>\n

In last year\u2019s edition<\/a>, 32 percent of participants reported already realizing savings from AI and 55 percent expected to going forward. That\u2019s nice. Would be a shame if a technology hemorrhaging money with no coherent business model came along to disrupt that! This year, respondents started grumbling \u2014 unprompted<\/a> \u2014 about the shift from subscriptions to token and credit pricing. \u201cThe token\/credit costs seem to be changing as the definition of a task evolves,\u201d one law firm participant said.<\/p>\n

Behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Claude, and per token pricing followed with him.<\/em><\/p>\n

Welcome to Tokengeddon<\/a>. It was all fun and games while the labs hoped to entrench the product into workflows, but now it\u2019s time to try to make some money. We\u2019re going to find out exactly how much the firm hates letting a summer associate take a first stab at that summary.<\/p>\n

\n

One described it as an effort to drive cost savings and efficiency. \u201cLeaders want to do more with less and see legal AI as a means to that end, so they want us to leverage it, and now that cost structures are shifting to per-use tokens, we are beginning to bill back token costs to the business units,\u201d the participant said. \u201cThere is a reckoning taking place now, so the use cases will become better defined; I don\u2019t need to burn down the rainforest to find my favorite Chinese restaurant,\u201d the individual added. \u201cThere is intense pressure, mainly from executive leadership; using Legal AI to be more efficient is a pillar that helps dilute the perception of legal as a cost center,\u201d added a peer.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But what if it\u2019s not actually saving clients money? Early reports suggest it\u2019s not bringing down hours<\/a>. For all the drudgery it can alleviate, it also offers insights that lawyers might not have seen before and end up with more time spent creating a better product than a human alone would have produced. That should be good news for the client, but not if they imagine AI as a \u201cget out of bill free\u201d card. <\/p>\n

The report also notes that 62 percent of respondents are using AI agents. As an agentic doubter<\/a>, that number surprised me, but the interviews undermined the top line number. Most of those using agents reported using basic information gathering, scheduled lit hold reports, and bots to \u201cextract data to populate automated forms.\u201d Hardly the soup-to-nuts automation that the hype imagines. Only 10 percent thought legal AI would become exclusively agentic \u2014 and frankly that feels too high. Assuming agentic AI ever develops enough reliability to autonomously perform a string of complex legal tasks, the problem becomes a fundamentally human one: keeping the process slow enough<\/a> for the human brain to exercise meaningful judgment and oversight. So far, lawyers seem to understand that risk.<\/p>\n

But the task that agents excel at is \u201cburning massive piles of unnecessary tokens.\u201d At the risk of oversimplification, an agent is a self-managing cascade of prompts that plans, calls a tool, reads the result, checks itself, and loops, burning somewhere between five and 30 times the tokens<\/a>. Great use cases exist, but the \u201cpromise\u201d of agentic AI is that it can take the three prompts a human might need to achieve a working result and replace them with six subagents constantly spinning to produce the same thing. The connection to Tokengeddon isn\u2019t explicit, but it\u2019s there. Because, with mounting open weight competition, \u201ccost per token\u201d isn\u2019t going to get more expensive, so everyone needs to pad those tokens per project numbers.<\/p>\n

Again, I\u2019m not saying that there aren\u2019t solid use cases for agents. But it\u2019s going to be interesting to see how these cost concerns collide with agents.<\/p>\n

The good news of the report is that more of the legal industry is adopting AI. The better news is that the industry appears to be keeping a tight lid on how it\u2019s deployed. Which is good news for the public sitting underneath that dam.<\/p>\n

\n

\"Headshot\"Joe Patrice<\/a>\u00a0is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. Feel free to\u00a0email<\/a> any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The post New Report Finds More Lawyers Use AI, But For What Tasks?<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

DISCO\u2019s 2026 Legal AI Report<\/a> opens by announcing that this \u201cmay be the year the legal tech dam finally burst.\u201d Compared to the legal industry\u2019s baseline, that makes some sense, with simple adoption taking a huge leap this year. Despite the gushing imagery though, the rest of the report suggests less of a violent burst, and more of a substantial, yet controlled opening of the sluice gates at Flood Control Dam #3, allowing a managed release to gently flow downstream. <\/p>\n

The survey, run by Ari Kaplan Advisors, drew 104 respondents roughly split between firms and legal departments, and supplemented by direct interviews. Fifty-eight percent of respondents say they\u2019ve folded AI into routine processes, up from 35 percent last year. Seventy-two percent say they\u2019re confident using it for document review over manual techniques, up from 53 percent. And security fears among firm respondents fell from 68 percent to 43 percent. <\/p>\n

But what do those numbers really mean<\/em>? \u201cRoutine processes\u201d provide efficiency opportunities, but it\u2019s hardly the same as handing hefty chunks of complex tasks to AI. Using AI for document review? You have been for years! One respondent claimed they would \u201cnever go back to a manual review for first- or second-pass review,\u201d but when was the last time anyone cracked open a 2TB drive and started a manual review? We\u2019ve trusted the machines to handle eDiscovery tasks ever since we fought over seed sets. That\u2019s not a knock on the advancements in this space, rather a reminder that this is a slice of the practice that traditionally luddite lawyers have long shown a willingness to hand to the machines. <\/p>\n

And when we say security fears are down, is that because the lawyers have learned to trust the AI\u2026 or trust their external and internal limits on how it\u2019s used?<\/p>\n

Generally speaking, the use cases look like the ones we predicted: deposition summaries, chronologies, first drafts, research, a \u201csparring partner in litigation.\u201d One participant described the shift as moving \u201cfrom doing the work to directing the work,\u201d which is\u2026 how law firms work. There\u2019s just a robot doing the first-year\u2019s tasks. Which is a win for the lawyers. But the AI evangelists \u2014 and more to the point, their investors \u2014 need AI to replace human work across the board so they can fulfill their misanthropic vision of harvesting white collar workers like the human batteries from The Matrix<\/em> while melting poor people for organic pet shampoo. For them, an industry responsibly adding AI to speed its workflow by 11 percent amounts to a waking nightmare leaving them a trillion in the hole.<\/p>\n

In last year\u2019s edition<\/a>, 32 percent of participants reported already realizing savings from AI and 55 percent expected to going forward. That\u2019s nice. Would be a shame if a technology hemorrhaging money with no coherent business model came along to disrupt that! This year, respondents started grumbling \u2014 unprompted<\/a> \u2014 about the shift from subscriptions to token and credit pricing. \u201cThe token\/credit costs seem to be changing as the definition of a task evolves,\u201d one law firm participant said.<\/p>\n

Behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Claude, and per token pricing followed with him.<\/em><\/p>\n

Welcome to Tokengeddon<\/a>. It was all fun and games while the labs hoped to entrench the product into workflows, but now it\u2019s time to try to make some money. We\u2019re going to find out exactly how much the firm hates letting a summer associate take a first stab at that summary.<\/p>\n

\n

One described it as an effort to drive cost savings and efficiency. \u201cLeaders want to do more with less and see legal AI as a means to that end, so they want us to leverage it, and now that cost structures are shifting to per-use tokens, we are beginning to bill back token costs to the business units,\u201d the participant said. \u201cThere is a reckoning taking place now, so the use cases will become better defined; I don\u2019t need to burn down the rainforest to find my favorite Chinese restaurant,\u201d the individual added. \u201cThere is intense pressure, mainly from executive leadership; using Legal AI to be more efficient is a pillar that helps dilute the perception of legal as a cost center,\u201d added a peer.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But what if it\u2019s not actually saving clients money? Early reports suggest it\u2019s not bringing down hours<\/a>. For all the drudgery it can alleviate, it also offers insights that lawyers might not have seen before and end up with more time spent creating a better product than a human alone would have produced. That should be good news for the client, but not if they imagine AI as a \u201cget out of bill free\u201d card. <\/p>\n

The report also notes that 62 percent of respondents are using AI agents. As an agentic doubter<\/a>, that number surprised me, but the interviews undermined the top line number. Most of those using agents reported using basic information gathering, scheduled lit hold reports, and bots to \u201cextract data to populate automated forms.\u201d Hardly the soup-to-nuts automation that the hype imagines. Only 10 percent thought legal AI would become exclusively agentic \u2014 and frankly that feels too high. Assuming agentic AI ever develops enough reliability to autonomously perform a string of complex legal tasks, the problem becomes a fundamentally human one: keeping the process slow enough<\/a> for the human brain to exercise meaningful judgment and oversight. So far, lawyers seem to understand that risk.<\/p>\n

But the task that agents excel at is \u201cburning massive piles of unnecessary tokens.\u201d At the risk of oversimplification, an agent is a self-managing cascade of prompts that plans, calls a tool, reads the result, checks itself, and loops, burning somewhere between five and 30 times the tokens<\/a>. Great use cases exist, but the \u201cpromise\u201d of agentic AI is that it can take the three prompts a human might need to achieve a working result and replace them with six subagents constantly spinning to produce the same thing. The connection to Tokengeddon isn\u2019t explicit, but it\u2019s there. Because, with mounting open weight competition, \u201ccost per token\u201d isn\u2019t going to get more expensive, so everyone needs to pad those tokens per project numbers.<\/p>\n

Again, I\u2019m not saying that there aren\u2019t solid use cases for agents. But it\u2019s going to be interesting to see how these cost concerns collide with agents.<\/p>\n

The good news of the report is that more of the legal industry is adopting AI. The better news is that the industry appears to be keeping a tight lid on how it\u2019s deployed. Which is good news for the public sitting underneath that dam.<\/p>\n

\n

\"Headshot\"Joe Patrice<\/a>\u00a0is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. Feel free to\u00a0email<\/a> any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DISCO\u2019s 2026 Legal AI Report opens by announcing that this \u201cmay be the year the legal tech dam finally burst.\u201d Compared to the legal industry\u2019s baseline, that makes some sense, with simple adoption taking a huge leap this year. Despite the gushing imagery though, the rest of the report suggests less of a violent burst, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":163801,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-163826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-above_the_law"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163826"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163826\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/163801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}