In-house lawyers demand transparency and accuracy as law firms turn to AI for legal services delivery
In-house lawyers have issued a pointed message to law firms: embrace AI smartly—or risk losing our trust, and your place on our panels.
Responses to RollOnFriday’s In-house Lawyer Survey 2025 reveal a profession standing on the edge of technological transformation—curious, cautious, and occasionally cutting.
While many respondents acknowledged the potential for artificial intelligence to streamline processes and reduce costs, they drew a red line around reliability and ethics. Any attempt to deploy AI without transparency, they warned, would be met with backlash.
One GC summed it up bluntly: “Being sent something hallucinated by AI would be a relationship killer.” Another was even more direct: “I would be furious to learn I have been charged a fee for someone’s time and skill, only to find out they made the AI do the heavy lifting.”
Some lawyers said they feared firms would secretly use client data to fine-tune their proprietary AI systems. “I’d want to know when firms do it, and make sure they’re not putting in my company’s information to train the AI,” one respondent warned.
Embed from Getty ImagesDespite these concerns, there was a sense that resistance to AI is futile—especially when their own companies are pushing full steam ahead with digital transformation. “There’s an AI wave coming, and clients are interested in seeing how this translates to legal services,” said one lawyer in the architecture sector.
Still, the rollout must come with caveats. Multiple respondents said AI tools are currently too inaccurate to rely on for technical work. “It’s unreliable and quite inappropriate for usually highly technical legal work,” said one energy GC. “I don’t trust the results,” echoed another.
A senior financial services lawyer dismissed the current crop of tools as crude: “My own use of AI seems to show it’s more akin to a metacrawl at the moment and very much in the ‘garbage in, garbage out’ phase.”
A healthcare lawyer agreed, saying they had already seen “the dangers of reliance on AI with researching case law or basic process information, which has come up as being inaccurate.”
Despite those failures, some lawyers saw glimmers of promise. One pointed out that using AI isn’t all that different from how firms already delegate to juniors. “There’s nothing different between using AI and handing a template to a junior—other than AI is less prone to typos.”
And for one GC in financial services, there was even a whiff of dark humour: “Even if AI becomes self-aware and tries to kill us all, it will be considerably less irritating than the waves of junior lawyers they’ve tried in the past. At least Terminator robots don’t take up space in bars.”
Still, the clearest message from the survey is that clients want clarity. If law firms are going to integrate AI into their workflow, they must be upfront about how it’s being used—especially when it affects billing.
Cutting costs through automation may be welcome. Padding invoices while letting Lawbot8000 do the work? That’s a fast track to losing a client.
For now, law firms stand at a crossroads. In-house clients are willing to embrace innovation—but only if it comes with honesty, accuracy, and a human eye keeping the AI in check.
