The second in a two-part series, this report turns to the legal departments inside billion-dollar companies. Legora worked with legal industry analyst Ari Kaplan on a qualitative study of how AI is reshaping in-house legal work, drawn from candid conversations with 30 customers across 9 countries. Here is what those conversations revealed.
Corporate legal is undergoing its most significant transformation in a generation. Teams that leaned into AI early are improving quality, managing risk more effectively, responding faster, and unlocking capacity, while those who haven't are starting to fall behind. Legora has been at the center of this shift from the start, working directly with in-house teams to measure the value and impact of AI globally.
Why did we do this research? And why now?
Legal departments worldwide are rapidly adopting agentic AI tools across legal, risk, and compliance functions. These are early days in a decades-long transformation in how legal work gets done, and customers and the industry at large are looking to Legora to understand what leading adoption actually looks like.
Who did we interview?
30 customers at in-house teams across the United States, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Spain and Switzerland.
What kind of companies?
All respondents are Legora customers, spanning a range of industries, such as banking, private equity, pharmaceuticals, industrials, energy, and real estate.
Types of roles
Annual revenue
Company size
87% of respondents say removing Legora from their toolkit would be disruptive to daily work
Key finding 1
Teams using Legora respond to the business faster, turn work around more quickly, and get started sooner. The gains are concrete: one team cut review of a license agreement from 20 minutes to 2, on matters that typically require reading 30 to 50 related contracts. That responsiveness lets teams support more of the business, and the added visibility changes how legal is seen.
can respond to stakeholders faster when using Legora.
Survey Q15:
"Q15. On a scale of one to five, with five being the highest, has Legora changed how quickly you can respond to clients or internal stakeholders?"
94% respondents answered much faster or faster
see work get started faster, with reduced ramp-up time.
Survey Q15:
"Q15. On a scale of one to five, with five being the highest, has Legora changed how quickly you can respond to clients or internal stakeholders?"
94% respondents answered much faster or faster
say leaders view the legal department more positively because it uses Legora.
Survey Q15:
"Q15. On a scale of one to five, with five being the highest, has Legora changed how quickly you can respond to clients or internal stakeholders?"
94% respondents answered much faster or faster
can now support additional business units, directly or indirectly.
“Legora has enabled our diligence process to be much, much quicker. We invest in 1,000 companies a year, and having diligence take 10 minutes instead of an hour has been really helpful.”
Angela Prochnow
Director of Legal Operations, Y Combinator
Key finding 2
In-house counsel are custodians for the business, and managing risk sits at the center of that role. Their exposure grows with every contract, agreement, and obligation they are responsible for reviewing, and there is always more of it than any team can read closely by hand. Legora lets in-house teams review far more documents at scale, with a consistency and quality that is difficult to sustain manually, so fewer things pass through unchecked. That thoroughness is where risk can be better managed. Legora surfaces issues teams would have missed, raises angles that were not on the radar, and lets them validate their conclusions in ways that were not possible before.
are more confident in the quality of their work when using Legora.
Survey Q15:
"Q15. On a scale of one to five, with five being the highest, has Legora changed how quickly you can respond to clients or internal stakeholders?"
94% respondents answered much faster or faster
rate Legora's impact on improving quality, spotting issues, or reducing mistakes as transformational.
Survey Q15:
"Q15. On a scale of one to five, with five being the highest, has Legora changed how quickly you can respond to clients or internal stakeholders?"
94% respondents answered much faster or faster
identified a problem in a supplier or similar agreement they otherwise would have missed.
Survey Q15:
"Q15. On a scale of one to five, with five being the highest, has Legora changed how quickly you can respond to clients or internal stakeholders?"
94% respondents answered much faster or faster
now engage outside counsel on higher-value matters.
“Legora is that second set of eyes that everyone wishes they could get all the time.”
Legal Director
Fortune 100 company
Key finding 3
In-house teams are asked to do more without more headcount or budget. Legora lowers cost on two fronts. One, it absorbs work that used to be spread across a stack of point solutions, and teams retire the overlapping and inferior software they no longer rely on. Two, as teams can handle more work internally, they reserve outside counsel for the matters that genuinely need it rather than sending out routine work at a premium. That same efficiency shows up as capacity. Teams accomplish more with the people they already have and take on matters that were previously out of reach.
accomplish more in the same amount of time when using Legora.
Survey Q15:
"Q15. On a scale of one to five, with five being the highest, has Legora changed how quickly you can respond to clients or internal stakeholders?"
94% respondents answered much faster or faster
reallocate their saved time to higher-value legal analysis, strategy and complex judgment calls.
Survey Q15:
"Q15. On a scale of one to five, with five being the highest, has Legora changed how quickly you can respond to clients or internal stakeholders?"
94% respondents answered much faster or faster
say Legora has replaced or reduced their reliance on other tools or processes.
“If I have zero trade expertise in my department, but I know my question about trade compliance is pretty basic, I'm going to use Legora. That'll help me save on the outside counsel cost.”
Samson Wu
General Counsel, Cepheid
In-house legal teams are seeing a clear, measurable return on their investment in Legora. Across 30 customers in 9 countries, the pattern holds: work is higher in quality and lower in risk, teams do more without adding cost, and the business gets answers faster.
These are still early days. As AI becomes more embedded in the day-to-day work of legal departments, we expect measurement to mature. Baselines will sharpen, tracking will grow more consistent, and the insight will deepen as teams gather data over longer periods. The teams that start measuring now will have the clearest view of that trajectory.
The full report goes further than the findings on this page. It sets out the complete methodology and a set of tangible ROI considerations you can apply directly to your own business, turning what leading teams are already seeing into a repeatable way to measure your return.