In-House Lawyers Are The Biggest AI Users

The profession that struggles to find a PDF is arguably the most powerful user of artificial intelligence in the corporate world.

Harmonic Securitywhich sells AI governance software, analyzed 1,935,247 classified AI session minutes across the enterprise’s customer base and distributed the results across departments. Legislation and governance finished first with 19.5 percent of all AI hours. Go-to-market — sales, marketing, business development, the entire revenue organization — ranked second with 17.7. Design and development took third place in 13.3.

If anything, the raw percentages don’t sell it, because they’re departmental totals, not per capita numbers. Go to Market at a company large enough to buy governance software would generally involve an order of magnitude more people than a legal department. Corporations are always discounting the law, seeing it as a cost-cutting rather than a “useful” part of business. Whatever the per capita number is, it must legally destroy it.

Financial and organizational pressures on legal departments are likely to drive their use of AI. In-house lawyers are the only lawyers in America without any structural reason to offend efficiency. Every hour a legal department saves is an hour it doesn’t have to buy for $2,500. There is no billable target to hit and no completion rate to defend. The incentives of an in-house lawyer and the promise of AI point in exactly the same direction.

Harbor/CLOC legal department survey found GC by designing less costs from external lawyers and using AI as a tool in tariff negotiations. The inner counselor told one The Legal Geek Panel that they want to keep as much work in as possible and that AI is finally giving them a realistic opportunity to do so. Harmonic’s report converts those projections into measured behavior.

Meanwhile – and firms should read this piece twice – last week’s 8am numbers found small firms billing more hours per case than before AI arrived. So be aware that AI may not make things more efficient, instead it may open up lawyers to do more work than before.

Harmonic also found that Legal runs 67 percent of its AI hours through ChatGPT, which the study notes is the largest concentration of a functional tool anywhere in the data set. Claude gets 18 percent, Copilot 9, Gemini 4, Perplexity 1. The low number for Perplexity reflects the fact that the data is several months old, so we can’t tell what The leap of confusion in the legal space may have made for use.

Speaking of Claude, “Claude’s profile is diverse,” the report says, “he handles 41% of Strategy work and 40% of Finance, reflecting his stronger position in tasks that require sustained analytical reasoning.” (emphasis added). Well, legal! Will you take the shade “you’re not doing consistent analytical reasoning” lying down?

Legal is also, by far, the best-behaved department in the study, with just 4 percent of its AI time running on free personal accounts. However, Legal accounts for approximately one-third of all enterprise plan hours. Although it is not surprising that lawyers respect the risks of shadow IT more than a group of vendors.

Harmonic CEO Alastair Paterson describes it this way: “Legal is to be commended for the widespread use of enterprise tools, but even the small amount of personal use we’ve identified is a risk.”

But hey, let’s not dwell on the negatives now. Congratulations to all the in-house lawyers who finally found a tool they can use. The rest of the industry may struggle with technology, but you’re ahead of the curve. Or at least 96 percent of you are… we see you 4 percent in your personal accounts!

Earlier: Biglaw’s worst enemy isn’t AI, it’s clients using AI to stop paying them

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking like a lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions or comments. Follow him Twitter OR Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics and a healthy dose of college sports news.