A survey published online in 2026, covering 1,816 professionals across 62 countries – including private practice lawyers and legal professionals working in corporate and government departments, spanning law, tax, audit, compliance and global trade – sheds light on the gap between the AI strategies organisations have articulated and their effective application in day-to-day practice.
Corporate client expectations of law firms
The data on corporate clients who purchase legal services is particularly notable. 78% of those surveyed say that receiving AI-enabled quality improvements from their law firm is very important or essential. Yet only 6% report actually receiving such benefits from most or all of their current providers. As a result, 32% of clients have already reconsidered, or plan to reconsider within the next twelve months, their relationships with firms they perceive as falling behind on AI adoption. Among those reconsidering, one third estimate that more than one million dollars in annual work is at risk.
The gap between strategy and day-to-day practice
A recurring theme in the survey concerns the difficulty of translating stated AI strategies into concrete changes in how work is actually done. Among professionals whose organisation has a formally defined AI strategy, 35% say that strategy is not reflected in their day-to-day experience. 17% report that their organisation has no strategic direction on AI at all. Taken together, approximately half the profession is working in an environment where the AI strategy on paper does not correspond to operational reality.
The most commonly cited reasons for this gap are: the absence of the necessary tools (47%), insufficient training of staff (43%), failure to translate strategy into clear operational priorities (32%), and the lack of a shared understanding of the plan across the organisation (30%). The survey notes that all four are change management problems, not technical ones.
The most direct indicator of the impact of strategy is the following: in firms and departments with an explicitly defined AI strategy, 66% of professionals say AI is meeting or exceeding expectations in terms of value creation. Where no active strategy exists, that figure falls to 22%.
Three scenarios for the future of law firms
The survey sets out three distinct evolutionary paths for firms and legal departments. The first, termed “AI to Elevate”, envisages AI handling routine tasks and freeing time for higher-value work, with professional expertise and judgment remaining central to the service proposition. 52% of professionals identify with this scenario. The second, “AI to Scale”, is primarily oriented toward increasing operational capacity and managing growing volumes of work without proportional growth in headcount. The third, “AI to Reimagine”, involves a structural rethinking of the service model, with new commercial arrangements and novel value propositions – examples cited include subscription-based legal services and practices built natively around AI.
The survey observes that the deliberate choice of one of these paths produces materially better outcomes than the absence of a defined direction, regardless of which path is pursued.
