Despite a growing appetite for large scale operational innovation involving AI, Consilio’s latest global survey has found that 60% of legal professionals are currently absorbed with shorter-term operational solutions, particularly as they combat ever-increasing work volumes.
Respondents identified four key focus areas: contract management (67%); regulatory compliance and risk management (40%); information governance and records retention (38%); and legal project management solutions (32%). By prioritising these workstreams, teams hope to free up bandwidth, enabling them to turn their attention to larger scale innovations.
The fifth annual global survey, “Beyond the Gridlock: Overcoming the Challenges of Modern Legal Work,” found that nearly half (48%) of respondents ranked overwhelming work volume as the biggest challenge they face. They also cited growing budgetary restraints, rising eDiscovery costs, global complexities, and headcount freezes as causing additional pressure.
Looking at AI, while almost half (46%) of respondents acknowledged that AI will shape the future of the legal industry, only 32% of law firms and 20% of in-house teams said they are actively piloting, planning to deploy, or currently deploying AI solutions.
“We’ve continued to see the sheer scale of workload forcing many legal professionals to focus on fixing the here-and-now, which our research quantitatively reinforces,” said Michael Pontrelli, managing director of global strategic client experience at Consilio. “To enable them to allocate their efforts and resources toward innovative new technologies that can one day lessen their workload, right now respondents are focused on smaller reinventions of how they structure their daily work.
“Effective regulatory compliance, risk management, and information governance navigation are critical to unlocking bandwidth so that teams can focus on long-term transformation down the line.”
Consilio received responses from 212 in-house and private practice professionals between July-August 2024. They were based in Asia, the Middle East, Australia, the UK and Europe, and the United States.