66% of Inhousers Using ‘Raw’ Chatbots – Arrgghhhhh! – Artificial Lawyer

A major survey by Axiom of 600+ senior inhouse lawyers across eight countries on AI adoption has found that 66% of them are using ‘raw’ LLM chatbots such as ChatGPT, and only between 7% and 17% are using bona fide legal AI tools made for this sector.

There is something terrible about this, but also there is a silver lining.

The terrible bit first: if you’re primarily using a ‘raw’ chatbot approach for legal work then that suggests that what you can do with genAI is limited. You can’t really organise things in terms of proper workflows, and more likely this is an ad hoc, ‘prompt here and a prompt there‘, approach. It’s also a major data risk. It just shows a level of AI use that is what we can call ‘surface level’. There is no deep planning or strategy going on here at all it seems for many lawyers.

The positive bit…..a huge number of inhouse lawyers are now comfortable with using genAI. Now we just have to get them to understand why they need to use legal tech tools that have the correct structure, refinement, privacy safeguards, ability to be formed into workflows, and leverage agents in a controlled and repeatable way….and more.

OK, what else?

87% of legal departments handling AI procurement themselves without IT involvement – only 4% doing full IT partnerships.

Only 21% have achieved what Axiom is calling ‘AI maturity’ despite 76% increasing budgets by 26% on average for AI spending.

And that’s not great either, as it suggests a real ‘free-for-all’. It’s a kind of legal AI anarchy….

Plus, they found that ‘according to in-house leaders, 79% of law firms are using AI, but 58% aren’t reducing rates for AI-assisted work. 34% actually charging more for it’.

And that’s interesting….(see AL piece on law firms, AI and pricing.)

One other area worth noting is this bit about increasing budgets for AI spend across the world. In the US 80% of companies are increasing AI spend by 27% and in the UK it’s 71% at 22% increase. The world leader – in this survey – is Hong Kong, with 95% at 27% on average in terms of companies increasing their spend on AI.

Overall, a survey of both good and bad. But, one thing is for sure: inhouse lawyers and the companies they work for are using genAI now!

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