Your Briefing: What's Happening in Legal AI Right Now

From surging adoption numbers to shifting client expectations, an emerging law school reckoning, and a governance gap most firms haven't addressed — here's everything you need to know from the past few weeks.

By the Numbers

• 69% of legal professionals now use general-purpose AI tools for work

• 2x increase in adoption vs. last year (up from 31%)

• 32.5 days saved per year by lawyers using AI (avg. 5 hrs/week)

Sources:

→ 8am 2026 Legal Industry Report

→ 2025 Ediscovery Innovation Report, Everlaw

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Top Stories

ADOPTION

For BigLaw, AI is no longer optional. It's an expectation

The debate about whether to adopt AI has officially closed in large law firms. According to the 8am 2026 Legal Industry Report — surveying 1,300 legal professionals — 69% now use generative AI at work, more than double last year's 31%. At firms with 20 or more lawyers, 58% have implemented general-purpose AI tools firm-wide. The most common uses: drafting correspondence (58%), legal research (58%), and summarizing documents (47%). The gap is widening: firms with 51+ lawyers use AI at roughly double the rate of smaller practices, largely due to cost and resource constraints at smaller shops. The message is clear — AI literacy is fast becoming table stakes, not a differentiator.

→ 8am 2026 Legal Industry Report

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BUSINESS OF LAW

Clients are driving AI adoption, and firms that resist may lose work

Law firm leadership was early to champion AI, piloting tools, standing up task forces, and running internal experiments well before most clients asked for it. But the dynamic is shifting: the pressure to adopt is now increasingly coming from clients themselves. In-house teams are beginning to mandate AI-enabled workflows as a condition of instruction. A Shopify lawyer publicly said clients should insist their firms embrace AI, a signal of where corporate legal departments are headed. Separately, Crosby raised a $60M Series B to expand its hybrid AI law practice model. Industry analysts note the traditional billable-hour model is under pressure from AI efficiency gains, with firms increasingly expected to offer task-based or fixed-fee pricing for commoditized work, reserving hourly rates for bespoke advisory matters.

→ Crosby $60M Series B — Reuters Legal

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TOOLS WORTH WATCHING

Anthropic's Cowork hits general availability, and legal teams should take note

Anthropic's Claude Cowork, a desktop AI agent built for non-technical knowledge workers, reached general availability on April 9. Unlike Claude Code, which targets developers, Cowork is designed for departments like operations, finance, marketing, and legal. It works autonomously on your desktop, capable of organizing files, drafting documents across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, synthesizing research, and browsing the web without manual step-by-step instruction. Available on macOS and Windows, it is included at no extra cost in all paid Claude plans. For law firms evaluating AI tools that go beyond chat, it is one of the more practical starting points to experiment with now.

→ Anthropic Release Notes — Claude Cowork GA

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EDUCATION

Law schools are scrambling to keep pace with AI, and students are ahead of faculty

A growing consensus is forming: law schools are not adequately preparing graduates for an AI-enabled practice. The National Law Review's survey of 85 legal professionals found wide agreement that AI fluency is now an entry-level expectation,. but most curricula haven't caught up. A handful of schools are piloting AI-integrated clinics and simulation tools, but the broader reckoning is just beginning. As one law school dean put it, 2026 will be the year that 'AI literacy stops being a differentiator and starts being a baseline requirement for hire.'

→ National Law Review — 85 Predictions for AI and the Law in 2026

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GOVERNANCE

Most firms still have no AI policy, and Shadow AI is filling the void

43% of law firms have no AI policy and no plans to create one. Only 9% have an actively enforced policy, and more than half of firms offer no AI training whatsoever. The result: a rise in "Shadow AI," where lawyers under billing pressure use personal devices and consumer-grade tools — exposing privileged client data to systems that may use inputs for model training. Bar associations are clear: banning AI outright is both impractical and counterproductive, since AI is now embedded in Westlaw, Lexis, Microsoft 365, and Zoom. The consistent advice is to build a workable governance policy before an incident forces the issue.

→ 8am 2026 Legal Industry Report

→ NC Bar — Beyond the Ban: Why Your Firm Needs a Realistic AI Policy‍