The good news: Artificial intelligence may be reducing stress and giving lawyers more breathing room to do their jobs. The bad? Thanks to AI, many may not have jobs to worry about in the not-so-distant future.
A recent survey finds lawyers are experiencing less burnout as AI usage increases in law firms and in-house legal departments. Time-consuming, rote tasks are being taken off their plates, alleviating one of the most stressful aspects of legal work—deadline pressure.
“For decades, we've accepted certain truths as immutable: that legal work inherently involves countless hours of manual document review, that meeting client demands requires sacrificing work-life balance, and that burnout is simply the price of practicing law,” wrote Jasmine Singh, general counsel of Ironclad, the legal tech company that commissioned the survey. “But what if these assumptions are no longer valid?”
While the Ironclad survey shows lawyer concerns about being replaced by AI beginning to wane, another report finds that the vast majority of businesses are using artificial intelligence not to augment jobs but to replace them. And law firms continue to ratchet up rates to pay for new technology, a situation clients may tolerate if they see a future with lower legal costs (i.e., fewer associates).
Increasing Speed
Released over the summer, Ironclad’s survey was conducted by an independent research firm that asked 800 in-house counsel and law firm lawyers for their feelings about the state of artificial intelligence in the legal industry.
Nearly three-quarters of the lawyers using AI said it had sped up their work and increased productivity, and 6 in 10 said it had resulted in better-quality work. More than 90% agreed that AI has improved how they perform their job, and that it has helped them achieve their business goals more easily. AI, the survey report asserted, “has quickly turned from a ‘box to check’ to a business accelerant.”
The survey found that 69% of lawyers had incorporated AI into their work. Adoption rates are far higher, however, among in-house counsel than those at law firms. More than 80% of in-house lawyers had adopted AI compared to 55% of law firm lawyers.
In-house lawyers were also far more comfortable using AI than their law firm counterparts and had achieved “more success than law firms in integrating AI into existing workflows,” the report said. The survey shows that 34% of in-house counsel said they had no problem using agentic AI. Seventeen percent of law firm lawyers said the same.
Faster adoption and greater comfort with AI among in-house departments “could be due to greater alignment with broader business objectives and technology ecosystems. It could also be a sign that in-house teams feel pressure to get more done, faster, in order to prove their worth like any other department in a large organization,” the report said.
Stress Reliever
Ironclad also asked lawyers how they are currently feeling about their jobs. Overall, 41% of the lawyers surveyed reported burnout symptoms, with law firm attorneys feeling somewhat more frazzled (44%) than in-house lawyers (37%). The factors causing the highest levels of job dissatisfaction, the lawyers said, were meeting stressful deadlines, feelings of burnout and having too many tasks to complete in one day.
Those results, the report noted, are in line with surveys by ALM/Law.com, Bloomberg Law and others that also found between 40% and 45% of lawyers were facing burnout because of “high stress levels, excessive working hours and poor work-life balance, particularly in large firms.”
The Ironclad survey said that artificial intelligence is giving lawyers some hope for relief. Seventy-six percent of lawyers responding to the survey strongly or somewhat agreed that AI tools helped decrease feelings of burnout at work.
Many of the AI tools that lawyers use are “aligned to help address the leading causes of job dissatisfaction,” the report said. AI helped improve work speed for 72% of lawyers, which, in turn, has relieved time pressures. Roughly half of lawyers said they value AI for taking on mundane or rote tasks. And 57% said AI tools allowed them to be more strategic in their work, “suggesting that AI enables the higher-order thinking and planning that increases job satisfaction,” the report said.
Career Optimism
In general, in-house and law firm lawyers see AI as a positive for their career prospects, the Ironclad survey said. Among in-house lawyers, in particular, AI is seen as boosting their ability to communicate with business stakeholders, clients and outside counsel. More than a quarter of the lawyers surveyed said using AI tools has improved the quality of their business relationships, and just over 20% said AI skills have improved their professional image within their organizations.
“Beyond the obvious applications—contract review, research and risk identification —we're witnessing something more profound: a fundamental shift in what it means to practice law,” Ironclad’s Singh wrote. “The technology isn't just automating tasks; it's creating space for lawyers to engage with the intellectual and strategic aspects of their work that drew them to the profession in the first place.”
The positive feelings about AI tools are also fueling more optimism among lawyers about whether AI will create career opportunities. Nearly half of the lawyers surveyed—46%—said they believed AI will boost their careers. The feelings were rosier among in-house lawyers (55%) than those in firms (37%).
Nonetheless, losing their jobs remains a significant concern—especially among the law firm lawyers surveyed. Overall, 36% of all lawyers and 40% of those in law firms said they believe AI is snuffing out legal career opportunities.
Automation vs. Augmentation
They have some reason for concern, at least according to Anthropic, maker of Claude AI. In a report on the economic impact of AI released in September, Anthropic found that instead of augmenting human labor, artificial intelligence was replacing it.
Examining usage of the Claude AI platform, researchers found that 77% of the businesses using the software were automating tasks, with many engaging in “full task delegation.” In tech parlance, that means fully replacing human activity with AI.
While many business and tech leaders have touted artificial intelligence as a collaboration tool that will improve workers’ ability to do their jobs, just 12% of Claude usage is designed to augment tasks. “When businesses embed Claude into their applications, they largely delegate individual tasks rather than collaborate iteratively with models,” Anthropic found.
Futurism, a website covering technology and scientific developments, said Anthropic’s findings “are a stark reflection of businesses’ intentions” when deploying AI. “While many AI leaders have warned that AI will severely disrupt the job market, it’s often balanced by the sunny promise that it will work alongside human workers to make their jobs easier,” the website said. “But if over three-quarters of the companies in the report are using AI for outright automation, it portends much darker implications.”
While the report does not extend to other AI models like ChatGPT, Futurism noted that as “one of the leaders in the industry” Anthropic’s data “provides a useful barometer.”
Costs Soar
Meanwhile, legal industry analysts are openly discussing the day when law firms will be able to cut costs—and lawyers—and replace them with AI.
At the moment, however, firms are seeing major increases in operating costs as they incorporate new technology. Data released by Wells Fargo’s Legal Specialty Group in August showed that during the first half of 2025, law firm expenses—excluding salaries—soared by 8.6%. "In the meantime, you have both the associates and the AI, and there aren't any expense savings right now, it's just expenses," a Wells Fargo analyst said in an interview with Reuters.
How are firms paying for the technology upgrades? By passing the costs onto clients. While costs were up, revenues spiked as well, Wells Fargo found. During the first half of the year, rates rose by 9.2%, Wells Fargo said. That helped drive an 11.3% increase in revenue and a nearly 14% hike in profits per equity partner at the 130 firms Wells Fargo surveyed.
While the future of legal jobs may be uncertain, that hasn’t put a damper on people looking to enter the profession. As we recently wrote, the number of people applying to law school is at its highest level in 14 years.
And even with the costs associated with AI, firms have been hiring, according to data from the American Bar Association and the National Association for Law Placement (NALP). More than 80% of recent law school graduates have found a job, the ABA said. And according to NALP, nearly 60% took jobs in private practice—the highest level in more than 30 years.
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David L. Brown is a legal affairs writer and consultant, who has served as head of editorial at ALM Media, editor-in-chief of The National Law Journal and Legal Times and executive editor of The American Lawyer. He consults on thought leadership strategy and creates in-depth content for legal industry clients and works closely with Best Law Firms as senior content consultant.
