A new report shows that just 10 percent of law firms have implemented specific policies to guide their organization’s use of generative AI.

As discussed by Caroline Hill in Legal It Insider, while Thomson Reuters 2024 Generative AI in Professional Services report shows AI views among legal professionals are rapidly shifting (85 percent of law firms and corporate legal teams now think AI can be applied to their work) the report shows that legal organizations have a way to go in terms of setting the ground rules for the use of AI.

In addition to the fact that just 10 percent of law firms have implemented specific GenAI policies, only 8 percent of law firm respondents said that GenAI is covered under their existing technology policy, while 75 percent of firms said they don’t have a policy and 7 percent said they don’t know.

Conversely, 21 percent of corporate legal teams have implemented specific GenAI policies, while 13 percent said that GenAI is covered under their existing technology policy, while 56 percent of corporate legal teams said they don’t have a policy and 10 percent said they don’t know. Not great either.

The report found that 12 percent of law firms and corporate legal teams already using legal-specific AI and a further 43 percent planning to do so within the next three years. While 27 percent of law firms and corporate legal teams already use public AI tools such as ChatGPT, the rate of further adoption over the next three years is far less than industry-specific AI, with just 20 percent of legal respondents planning to make use of such tools.

In terms of who will bear the cost of firms’ investments in AI, 25 percent of law firms plan to pass along the cost of their investment in AI tools to clients (either across the board or on a case-by-case basis), while 51 percent plan to absorb the cost as an overhead. Yeah, sure they will. 🤣

39 percent of law firms believe that AI will lead to an increase in alternative fee arrangements as the billable hour model may likely no longer be sufficient to capture the “value-add” to a client from a law firm’s AI tool.

Caroline’s article has additional stats from the report. The lack of a specific GenAI policy for nine out of ten law firms and nearly eight out of ten corporate legal teams tells me that adoption of GenAI technologies in legal may be slower than we think. Just like it is for every other technology. 😩

So, what do you think? Are you surprised that just 10 percent of law firms have implemented specific GenAI policies? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using GPT-4o’s Image Creator Powered by DALL-E, using the term “robot lawyer holding up a blank document titled ‘GenAI Policy’”. See, even DALL-E can’t believe it! 🤣

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