Extract from Kathryn Lye’s article “The 56% Problem: Why Manual Document Tasks Are Holding Lawyers Back and What AI Can Do About It”
In an industry where time equals revenue, the fact that lawyers spend 56% of their time on manual document tasks should be a red flag — especially when much of that work is low-value, repetitive and rarely recoverable. Yet for many legal professionals, this has become a normalized part of practice — hunting for clauses, updating definitions, formatting contracts, and triple-checking terms before filing or sending to clients. It’s not just inefficient. It’s unnecessary and costly.
Despite years of legal tech innovation, most tools have barely scratched the surface of true productivity gains. They’ve digitized workflows but often complicated them at the same time. The result? Technology that often feels like more work to manage than it’s worth.
But something is shifting. A new generation of legal tech, including rapidly advancing AI and AI assistants, is introducing capabilities that don’t just automate individual steps. These tools act as proactive collaborators, intelligently navigating complex documents, surfacing key risks, applying context, and taking action. They’re helping legal teams move from manual to marvelous — and that transformation is happening faster than many realize.
The 56% Problem, Defined
The data is clear: more than half of a lawyer’s day — 56%, to be exact — is consumed by administrative and document-related tasks, according to findings published in The State of LegalTech Adoption white paper.
