The faster technology advances, the harder it becomes to track both incremental and significant changes in legal professionals’ adoption rates. The good news is that many options are available if you’re seeking current statistics about legal technology. These days, troves of data are released annually from different sources, obtained from different subsets of our profession.
The bad news is that sifting through the reports and gleaning insights on trends and shifts in usage can be challenging, given the sheer amount of information collected and shared in an increasing number of reports. It’s easy to get lost in the statistics and lose perspective, especially given the rapid rates of advancement in recent years. The legal technology landscape is changing quickly; blink, and you’ll miss an important piece of the puzzle.
However, you can rely on a few stalwart annual reports if you’re seeking a bird’s-eye view of long-term technological change in the legal field. One example is the American Bar Association’s longstanding Legal Technology Survey Report, which has been released annually for more than two decades. I’ve read and written about this report since 2010 and often refer to it for current legal technology statistics and analysis.
Most recently, the 2024 Legal Technology Report was released earlier this year and covers online research, marketing and communication technology, law office technology, litigation, and technology basics and security.
As I reviewed the report, I paid particular attention to three key areas of adoption: cloud computing, smartphones, and artificial intelligence (AI), topics I’ve covered extensively over the years.
First, let’s consider the smartphone data. Recall that the first BlackBerry smartphone was made available in 2002, and legal professionals fell head over heels for it. So it’s no surprise that in 2014, seven years after the introduction of the first iPhone and 10 years after Blackberry’s release, 91% of respondents used smartphones — whether iPhones, Blackberrys, or Androids — for work-related purposes.
That number went up two percentage points, to 93%, in 2017 and then to 97% in 2017. Around that time, likely due to smartphones’ undisputed ubiquity, the survey questions shifted from exploring adoption to learning more about use cases.
Next up, the cloud computing statistics. These were especially interesting when compared to data from past years. I reviewed articles I’d written along with those authored by others to obtain statistics dating as far back as 2011, which was three years after the first legal cloud-based products were released. In that report, only 16% of respondents shared that they used cloud-based tools for law-related work.
Over time, that percentage increased gradually. In 2012 (the year I was hired by MyCase, a cloud-based law practice management platform, and my book about cloud computing was published by the American Bar Association), a small minority of lawyers — 21% — used cloud-based tools.
A year later, in 2013, five years after legal cloud computing tools were available, it was up to 31%. This particular statistic and timeframe are important, so keep them in mind when we discuss AI adoption below.
By 2015, that percentage had increased significantly to 42%. A few years later, in 2018, a notable benchmark was reached: more than half of lawyers (55%) now used cloud tools. That statistic stayed relatively stable for the next two years during the pandemic (58% in 2020 and 60% in 2021), and then in 2022 it jumped dramatically to 70%, reflecting post-pandemic changes in attitudes toward cloud-based software.
Lastly, this year, the 2024 report showed a slight bump to 75%, with three-quarters of legal professionals now relying on this commonplace technology.
Turning to artificial intelligence, you’ll see that adoption rates differ dramatically. I first started writing about AI-based legal software in 2017, and a year later, in 2018, data from the report showed that only 8% of respondents used AI tools in their practices. For a few years, those rates increased gradually, hitting 10% in 2021 and then 11% in 2023. Note that the 2023 data reflected survey responses that were collected a year after ChatGPT was released publicly in November 2022, and legal-specific tools followed within months.
The data from this year’s report, collected in the fall of 2024, showed a dramatic increase to 30%. Based on my analysis of many recent reports, including the one I authored (the 2025 AffiniPay Legal Industry Report), that data point is consistent with the others, which indicate that approximately 30% of legal professionals use AI tools in their legal workflows.
Recall that it took five years for cloud adoption to reach this level, and in the span of just over two years, we’re already there with AI.
Notably, when asked when they thought artificial intelligence would become mainstream in the legal profession, 13% of respondents said it had already reached that point (compared with 4% in 2023, 6% in 2022, and 5% in 2021). Another 45% agreed that it would happen within the next three years (compared with 39% in 2023, 20% in 2022, and 17% in 2021).
No matter how you look at it, those statistics are striking. Lawyers are rapidly adjusting their mindsets to the reality of technology’s impact on the future of law and business as we know it.
Have you made that leap yet? If not, there’s no better time than now to acknowledge your ethical duty of technology competence and learn as much as you can about how to incorporate technology, including AI, into your firm. These tools will inevitably impact your practice, and understanding their implications and the many ways they can benefit your workflows and clients is the most reasonable path forward now that we’re in the midst of rapid and inescapable change.
Nicole Black is a Rochester, New York attorney and Principal Legal Insight Strategist at AffiniPay, parent company of MyCase, LawPay, CASEpeer, and Docketwise. She’s been blogging since 2005, has written a weekly column for the Daily Record since 2007, is the author of Cloud Computing for Lawyers, co-authors Social Media for Lawyers: the Next Frontier, and co-authors Criminal Law in New York. She’s easily distracted by the potential of bright and shiny tech gadgets, along with good food and wine. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikiblack and she can be reached at [email protected].