The percentage of law firm attorneys who say they use AI three or more times a week increased from 27% in 2025 to 47% this year, according to Law360 Pulse's 2026 AI Survey. Among in-house lawyers, 56% reported that same frequency of use for this year.
Other uses also seeing double-digit percentage growth include contract review and analysis, preparing court filings and trial preparation, Law360 Pulse found.
While AI adoption may have gone up, its use is still primarily limited to "surface level" tasks such as summarizing documents or refining language in emails, said Jen Leonard, founder of consulting firm Creative Lawyers. She believes that now is the time for the legal industry to deepen engagement and find more transformative use cases.
For example, lawyers could create avatars of potential clients and engage in a dialogue with them to better understand their needs and prepare for actual conversations with them. Or lawyers could use AI to provide real-time feedback to associates on their performance, Leonard said.
The report is based on a survey of 506 attorneys — 111 in-house counsel and 395 firm lawyers — from Nov. 12 to Jan. 22. Among firm participants, 24% were associates, 30% were equity partners and 12% were nonequity partners.
The number of law firm attorneys who have received no AI training dwindled, going down from 45% in 2025 to 34% in 2026, according to the report. Those who underwent training reported receiving it either from their firm, from another source or a combination. Even fewer in-house attorneys have received no training in AI, with 29% saying they have yet to be educated on the technology.
From 2025 to 2026, the percentage of firm attorneys who reported feeling positive about the technology dipped from 38% to 16% among those who use it up to twice a week. Of the firm attorneys who use AI three or more times per week, 73% reported feeling positive about the technology in 2025, but only 51% felt the same way in 2026, according to the report.
Comparatively, over the same period, the percentage of firm attorneys who reported feeling neutral about the technology increased from 41% to 58% among those who use it up to twice a week and from 21% to 44% among those who use it three or more times a week, Law360 Pulse found.
"Everybody who's trying to push the barriers of what the technology can do eventually runs into walls that they thought the AI would be able to leap right over," Green said. "[They] discover that it requires more work to get it to perform in the way that it needs to, particularly for high value, complex work."
Firm lawyers are most concerned about AI providing incorrect responses or learning inaccurate information and passing it on, followed by potential malpractice claims, fewer opportunities for newly minted attorneys to do basic legal work and potential security mishaps, according to the report.
The threat of AI taking white-collar jobs is a larger concern for attorneys who work in-house than for those who work at a law firm, at 54% and 29%, respectively.
The findings are similar for those at the earliest stages of their careers, with 41% of early-career in-house lawyers saying they are not very or not at all concerned about losing their jobs due to AI, compared with 55% of junior firm lawyers who feel similarly, according to the report.
Gunderson Dettmer is increasingly focused on using AI to provide clients with data-driven advice, Green said. For example, large language models have greatly enhanced lawyers' ability to finely tune legal points into contracts and legal agreements with greater specificity, he said.
"We're really leaning into those areas that allow us to do things that frankly would have been cost prohibitive or very cost prohibitive to do manually," Green said.
–Editing by Daniela Porat and Tim Ruel. Graphics by Jason Mallory.
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