Login | October 24, 2025
Survey shows AI use is growing among individual legal practitioners
SHERRY KARABIN
Legal News Reporter
Published: October 24, 2025
Interest in learning about and using generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools is growing among individuals in the legal profession.
As Nicole Black explains in her Aug. 28 post on MyCase.com (https://www.mycase.com/blog/ai/ai-adoption-in-law-firms/), the 2025 AffiniPay Legal Industry Report shows 31% of individual practitioners use generative AI tools, up from 27% in 2023.
Researchers surveyed over 2,800 legal professionals to find out how firms of all sizes and various practice areas are approaching AI adoption, including generative AI, combining individual and firm-level responses to provide a holistic view of the technology’s impact.
The results show practitioners who use the tools rely on them regularly, with 45% of respondents reporting they utilize AI daily and 40% saying they do so weekly.
While individual usage is on the rise, adoption by firms has decreased slightly from 24% last year to 21%.
“This decline likely reflects the cautious approach many firms are taking,” said Black. “Rather than rolling out AI across the board, firms appear to be testing these tools in limited ways—through pilot programs or in specific departments—before committing to broader implementation.”
The report finds interest and implementation vary significantly across practice areas for both individuals and firms, with 47% of immigration attorneys using generative AI daily.
Other areas with high individual adoption rates include personal injury (37%), civil litigation (36%), and criminal law (28%).
In the case of firms, 27% of those with civil litigation practices have adopted it, followed by personal injury and family law firms (20% each) and trusts and estates and criminal law firms (18%).
Interestingly, immigration firms had the lowest adoption rates at 17%, despite the high level of use by individual practitioners.
The results of the survey also indicate that firm size plays a major role in adoption and use, said Black.
In fact, the larger the firm, the more likely it is to have embraced generative AI, which is particularly true for organizations that are integrated into existing legal research or practice management platforms.
Thirty-nine percent of firms with 51 or more lawyers report using legal-specific generative AI tools, nearly double the rate of those with 50 or fewer lawyers, where usage rate data hovered around 20% across solo, small and mid-sized practices.
Also of note, legal professionals who regularly use generative AI prefer to apply it to early-stage tasks, with 54% of respondents stating they utilize it to draft correspondence and 47% relying on it to help them brainstorm ideas or strategies.
Other common applications include general legal research (46%) and document summarization (39%).