Progress Software: 85% of Lawyers Use AI — But 77% Say Their Work Remains Predominantly Manual

Progress Software's State of Legal 2026 benchmarking report — based on a nationwide survey of US-based lawyers conducted by Regina Corso Consulting and published July 8 — documents the most important gap in the current legal AI market: 85% of lawyers use AI for legal research, document summarization, and intake support, but 77% say much of their work remains manual and 73% report workflows with too many steps. The gap between AI adoption and process transformation is the primary commercial opportunity for productized legal service delivery: firms and legal tech platforms that can close the workflow design gap — connecting AI tools to end-to-end legal processes with minimal human-mediated steps — will create a cost and speed advantage over competitors who have AI tools but still route everything through manual process chains. For legal operations and product leaders, the Progress data is a blueprint for where productization investment will return the highest margin improvement: document management automation, AI-powered intake, and structured client delivery workflows are the three highest-frequency manual friction points identified in the survey.