Extract from Benjamin Joyner’s article “Law Firms Continue to Lag Legal Departments in AI Adoption”
Firms continue to lag well behind in-house teams in AI adoption, according to a new report published by contract management solutions provider Ironclad.
According to the 2025 State of AI in Legal report, firm attorneys trail counterparts in legal departments by 26 percentage points in AI adoption, with only 55% of firm attorneys using AI tools for legal work compared to 81% of in-house lawyers.
“The adoption of AI more globally, across the entire enterprise, is likely galvanizing the legal team to keep pace,” said Jasmine Singh, Ironclad’s general counsel.
“There are [law firm] lawyers who just may not have that much exposure to AI in their day-to-day practice, and so they’re less incentivized and less required in their practice to use AI than I think in-house lawyers are,” Singh added.
A majority (69%) of attorneys surveyed overall use AI tools for legal work, a drop from last year’s 74%. Singh suggested this may be a result of organizations moving from initial experimental phases with AI towards more targeted uses of select applications.
“They may have been experimenting with multiple tools, now they’re just power-using the few that are in their repertoire and that they know are the ones that are tried and true for them,” she said. “It’s not necessarily that overall usage is declining, it’s just dispersed, massive usage to experiment—things that might be irrelevant to their actual day-to-day job—that’s dropping down because now they’re focusing on the core use.”
