AI Agents for Legal Teams: Faster Contracts, Research, and Client Intake
79% of legal professionals already use AI, and agentic AI is the next wave, per Clio's 2025 Legal Trends Report and the Thomson Reuters Institute. Here's how firms are automating contracts, research, and intake, and what's still holding agentic AI back.
AI Agents for Legal Teams: How Firms Are Automating Contracts, Research, and Client Intake
Legal is past the "should we use AI" debate. According to Clio's 2025 Legal Trends Report, 79 percent of legal professionals now use AI in their practice — matching 2024's figure, but with adoption spreading unevenly: 87 percent of large-firm lawyers use it, versus 71 percent at solo practices. The bigger shift is what comes next. Agentic AI — systems that don't just draft or summarize but actually complete multi-step legal workflows — is now moving from experiment to early deployment, and the numbers on how fast that's happening come straight from two of the industry's own primary research shops.
The Legal Industry's AI Adoption, By the Numbers
The pace is genuinely fast. At the start of 2024, just 14 percent of law firms and corporate legal departments had an enterprise-wide generative AI tool in place. Two years later, that number is 43 percent, according to the Thomson Reuters Institute's 2026 AI in Professional Services Report. More than half of surveyed organizations expected large-scale GenAI rollouts within 1–3 years back in 2024 — and that prediction largely came true.
Agentic AI is tracking a similar curve, just a couple of years behind. Fewer than 20 percent of firms and legal departments currently have widespread agentic AI in place, but roughly half are either actively planning to adopt it or seriously considering it. Sentiment is notably positive: 51 percent of legal professionals say they feel excited or hopeful about agentic AI, versus 19 percent who feel concerned or fearful.
Where Agentic AI Is Actually Landing in Legal Work
Contracts and Document Work
Clio's report highlights a specific and telling divergence: only 40 percent of legal professionals now use legal-specific AI tools, down from 58 percent in 2024 — a sign that many are leaning on general-purpose tools like ChatGPT or Gemini instead, likely because free tiers make them easier to adopt than dedicated legal software. That's exactly the gap agentic legal tools are built to close: systems that can pull from case law, draft a document based on the findings, flag pitfalls, and revise — with legal-specific grounding that general tools lack.
Legal Research
Legal research is one of the most established AI use cases, and it's also where the risk of hallucinated citations is highest with generic tools — a concern Clio's report raises directly about first-to-market AI solutions that "lack the foundational training and grounding in legal data needed to be proficient in law." Legal-specific agentic tools are built to stay grounded in verified case law rather than fabricate precedent.
Client Intake
Growing law firms in Clio's analysis show a striking pattern: they doubled their revenue over four years while increasing lawyer headcount by only 25 percent — meaning revenue grew four times faster than headcount. Client intake and case management efficiency is a meaningful part of how that math works, and it's a natural fit for agentic workflows that qualify and route new client inquiries without adding staff.
The Real Barrier Isn't the Technology — It's Oversight
The Thomson Reuters Institute's research points to something specific slowing agentic adoption in legal that didn't apply the same way to generative AI: autonomy itself makes lawyers nervous. Asked why they're hesitant about agentic AI, legal professionals most often cited a general fear of the unknown, followed closely by the need for careful monitoring and oversight. One US law firm lawyer put it directly: "I like the idea of prompting and reviewing a result. It is something else to have a machine have so much autonomy in the actual doing of a thing." That's a meaningfully different concern than "does this technology work" — and it's why the report calls for law firms to over-explain exactly where human review sits inside an agentic workflow, rather than assuming lawyers will trust it by default.
Where a Platform Like Workmate Fits In
The oversight gap Thomson Reuters Institute keeps surfacing — lawyers wanting the productivity of agentic AI without losing visibility into what a system is doing — is exactly the problem a custom-agent platform like Workmate is built around, rather than a general-purpose assistant bolted onto existing software. Workmate builds AI agents around a firm's actual tools (document management, case management, CRM, and 3,000+ other integrations) with admin-level control baked in: access to every connected system is set by an admin, and credentials sit behind a vault that can require a human's approval before an agent uses them. That's a direct answer to the "I like reviewing a result, not handing over the doing of it" concern one Thomson Reuters survey respondent raised — the agent still does the contract triage, research pull, or intake routing, but a person controls what it's allowed to touch and can require a check-in before it acts. Workmate is also SOC 2 Type II audited, which matters for a profession where client confidentiality isn't optional.
What This Means for Legal Teams Going Forward
The firms pulling ahead aren't trying to automate judgment calls — they're pointing agentic AI at the structured, repeatable load: contract review and drafting, grounded legal research, and client intake triage, while keeping a lawyer firmly in the loop for anything that touches actual legal judgment or client-facing risk. Given that less than 20 percent of lawyers say their organizations even measure AI's ROI yet, per Thomson Reuters, the firms that get disciplined about both adoption and measurement now are the ones likely to compound that advantage the way Clio's "growing firms" already have.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are law firms actually using agentic AI yet, or is it still hype? Real, but early. Thomson Reuters Institute research shows fewer than 20 percent of firms have widespread agentic AI in place today, but about half are already planning or actively considering adoption — a trajectory that closely mirrors how generative AI itself spread through the industry from 2024 to 2026.
What's the biggest obstacle to agentic AI adoption in legal? Oversight, not capability. Legal professionals surveyed by Thomson Reuters Institute cited the need for careful monitoring as their top concern about agentic systems specifically — a different worry than the general excitement they've expressed about generative AI.
Where should a law firm start with agentic AI? Contract drafting/review, grounded legal research, and client intake are the highest-leverage starting points — high-volume, well-defined tasks where Clio's own data shows legal-specific AI tools already outperform generic ones on accuracy and grounding.
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