Thomson Reuters: AI Frees 4 Hours Per Week Per Professional Within One Year

Thomson Reuters' 2026 Future of Professionals report (published July 24) projects AI could free up an additional 4 hours per week per legal professional within one year — roughly 200 hours over a working year per person. The report covers the full professional services market. For a mid-sized firm with 100 lawyers, 200 freed hours per lawyer translates to 20,000 hours of potential redeployment annually — equivalent to roughly 10 additional full-time associates. Thomson Reuters frames the gap between this potential and realized value as the "AI execution gap": most firms acknowledge the productivity thesis but have not built the operating model to capture it. The report also draws a principles-based adoption framework that Reuters Legal covered separately (July 23): articulate what problems AI is solving before selecting tools, measure before and after, and treat AI adoption as a management discipline, not an IT deployment.