Ninety-three percent of respondents to Juro's State of In-House 2025 report said managers expect attorneys to either start incorporating artificial intelligence into their work, 24%, or further invest their energies into the technology, 69%, with only 7% directed to stop using the software. The majority of those surveyed, 76%, report to either a chief executive or chief financial officer.
"Incremental investment into automations will come before incremental investment in people," Andy Hodgson, Juro's chief financial officer, said in a statement Monday. "It will be the back-office and support functions — legal included — that will feel this pressure soonest and hardest."
The company asked 160 in-house lawyers around 30 questions on topics including the use of AI in their legal practices. Over half of the respondents identified as the most senior attorneys at their companies, with respondents ranging from over 20 countries, including the U.S. and most of Europe.
Over the past year, 83% of respondents reported using AI in legal research, 79% used the software to draft clauses and 58% relied on the technology for contract review. When asked about tasks being considered for automation in the following months, redlining contracts led all other options at 61%.
While executives show enthusiasm for AI, over half of the attorneys surveyed, 53%, believe the technology risks making attorneys less capable and knowledgeable as reasoning and written tasks become automated, and 52% believe it could negatively impact the environment as companies disregard the computational bandwidth required to run the software regularly.
Founded in 2016 with offices in Massachusetts and London, Juro offers contract management solutions using artificial intelligence. Juro last raised money in 2022, bringing in $23 million in a Series B funding round.
Several studies related to AI in law — some of them with conflicting results — have been published during the first quarter of the year.
A Law360 Pulse survey published on March 4 found more attorneys seem to be using generative AI tools and view them positively compared with last year. However, lawyers are still concerned about legal ethics and client confidentiality when it comes to the technology.
Attorneys are also still being sanctioned for improper use of the technology. In February, a Wyoming federal judge sanctioned attorneys from Morgan & Morgan PA and the Goody Law Group after they filed pretrial motions containing case law hallucinated by AI, while a federal magistrate judge in Indiana recommended sanctions against a Texas lawyer for filing three separate briefs that included fake citations generated by AI.
The share of S&P 500 companies that disclosed some level of board oversight or AI competency in their proxy statements jumped from just over 17% in 2023 to nearly 32% in 2024, according to the report from ISS-Corporate, which provides data and analytics to corporations. Compared to 2022, when just 12.3% of companies made such disclosures, last year's figures rose by more than 150%.
--Additional reporting by Sarah Jarvis. Editing by Drashti Mehta.
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