Legal AI Access at 83%, But Trust Issues Remain

A new survey of over 200 inhouse and law firm leaders provides solid evidence that while AI tools are now ‘standard’ across our sector, that trust in AI outputs fundamentally drives usage, along with ROI – and vice versa.

The data, from ALSP Factor, shows that 83% had ‘broad AI access’, which is up from 61% in 2025, and in itself is a very positive development that tells us legal AI is now becoming ubiquitous for commercial lawyers, with around 54% using such tools ‘often’.

However, as Factor CEO, Varun Mehta, noted: ‘In 2025, the story was experimentation: new tools, early pilots, and promising use cases. In 2026, the market has largely solved for access. The question is whether legal teams can translate genAI into defensible, repeatable impact in day-to-day work.’

And at the heart of moving to this next level is accuracy and trust. Put simply, legal teams that received generally reliable outputs from legal AI tools and did not have to go back and extensively check results, understandably developed trust in the tools.

Trust in turn tends to drive regular usage, and regular use drives real ROI.

Or as the survey found: ‘Only 22.1% report high trust in outputs, [but] high trust teams are 3x more likely to report positive ROI.’

And there are multiple ways to get better accuracy. One way is simply to have better base models (see below), but legal AI systems that have access to relevant legal data, finely tuned playbooks, and highly specific workflows tailored to a lawyer’s needs, will help plenty as well.  

Note: on the ROI point, the law firm and inhouse data is mixed together, and this aspect works differently on either side of the market because of the way the billable hour makes it very hard for law firms to show the financial benefits of using efficiency-driving tools.

That said, broadly it’s clear that the more you use a tool, the more its cost is positively balanced out. And conversely, tools you don’t use can never really show ROI, whether you’re limited by the systemic constraints of the billable hour or not.

Hence, this survey finding is important: ‘69.7% [of outputs] still require targeted edits or extensive rework. AI is accelerating drafting and research, but review and defensibility remain the main constraints on workflow-level scale.’

As AL has noted before, without accuracy we cannot ever reach real industrialisation of legal workflows; moreover the use of agents – where we trust a piece of software to make decisions in relation to one or more workflows that are connected – is even more constrained if we doubt the end results.

In this case, Factor is understandably highlighting the benefits of their ALSP approach, i.e. they are using AI at scale to help with needs such contract review, but they’re also keeping in place a human team of reviewers to provide quality control.

Of course, and as noted last week re. LegalOn’s study into GPT 5.4’s improved accuracy, LLMs when applied to legal needs are getting better every few months. If you then add in more context, improved prompts, access to relevant data and playbooks, that accuracy can get much higher.

In short, what this survey tells us – when set against a background of steadily improving models and added legal tooling – is that accuracy will get better and better; and, based on the above results, that in turn will drive trust, which will drive both more use and clear ROI, (at least for legal teams inside corporates).

P.S. one other finding is that contract review and related tasks, e.g. summarisation, are the leading use case at present for legal AI.

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You can find the full report on the Factor website here.

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A Legal Tech Conference For All of Europe

Legal Innovators Europe – Paris – June 24 and 25.

There will be more news about the conference and key speakers as we get closer to June.

Look forward to seeing you there!

Richard Tromans, Founder, Artificial Lawyer and Legal Innovators conference Chair.

Note: the conferences are organised by Cosmonauts – please contact them with any queries. 

If you would like to be a speaker at Legal Innovators Europe, especially if you are at a law firm or inhouse legal team in Europe – whether based in France, Belgium, Spain or Germany, or beyond…..then please contact Phoebe at Cosmonauts:  phoebe@cosmonauts.biz

Note: if you are a legal tech company, please contact Robins: robins@cosmonauts.biz or Anjana anjana@cosmonauts.biz

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And if you’re in the US and looking for the next major event to join after Legal Week, then see you in California this June!

Legal Innovators California, the landmark West Coast legal tech event, will take place on June 10 and 11, in the heart of the Bay Area, the home to many of the world’s leading AI businesses – and plenty of legal tech pioneers as well! More information and tickets here.