Thomson Reuters: GenAI Doubles in a Year — Clients Now Demanding It

The Thomson Reuters GenAI in Professional Services Report, covered by GlobalLegalPost, documents GenAI use among firms and in-house teams jumping from 14% to 26% in a single year — a pace that signals demand-pull, not just supply-push adoption. The more strategically significant finding is on the client side: 59% of corporate law departments want their outside counsel using GenAI, and 8% are now mandating it in formal tender documents. For mid-sized firms competing on RFPs, the absence of a credible GenAI story is becoming a disqualifier, not just a differentiator. Use cases are concentrating in legal research (74%), brief and memo drafting (59%), and contract drafting (58%) — all high-volume, associate-intensive workflows where time savings compound quickly. Among firms already measuring ROI, 79% are tracking cost savings, suggesting that measurement frameworks are maturing alongside tooling.