Linked – ‘Give Us Legal AI Or We’re Leaving’ – Survey
This survey was done with lawyers in the UK and Ireland. US law firms may want to pay attention, though:
A new survey by LexisNexis of lawyers’ views on legal tech has found that ‘failure to embrace AI’ could lead to 11% considering leaving, which rose to 19% at larger law firms.
https://www.artificiallawyer.com/2025/02/20/give-us-legal-ai-or-were-leaving-survey/
I wonder why AI is the technological hill they are willing to die on. I assume that law firms are perhaps being extremely cautious with AI usage. Still, firms have been careful with various technologies—collaborative tools, file sharing, social media, cloud adoption, mobile devices, etc. I’ve seen many tools that lawyers wanted to use today, and they took months, if not years, to become available to them. Why now, with AI, is this the issue they’d leave over?
I think the article attempts to explain this:
The answer is multi-part, at least from Artificial Lawyer’s perspective. While some law firms are moving cautiously and some perhaps are worried about how AI may impact their business model, the reality is that the world has moved on. Clients are using AI tools. Lawyers and their friends and family are using AI tools at home and outside of their core work. It’s embedded now, it’s normalised now.
The hype around AI has reached levels we’ve never seen before. Even skeptics of how well AI works must acknowledge that most professionals are aware of AI tools and curious enough to try them out. Do those efforts match the hype? Likely not, but the fact that AI is everywhere they look right now, except at work, tells them a lot about the firm they are working in. It’s not what they want to see from their firm.
What would be interesting to me is a follow-up survey of how many partners would leave if the firm did embrace AI and push them to use it in their practice. Given the technologies I listed earlier, I suspect firms may find themselves between a rock and a hard place, which should be familiar. We’ve seen this before.
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