In-house legal teams are shifting gears. With headcount growth slowing and workloads rising, they're turning to technology and creativity to meet growing demands and deliver more with less.

Our 2025 survey shows that legal departments are entering a new era of smarter scaling. While just 23% of in-house counsel expect their teams to grow, down from 56% in 2023, more than half (51%) anticipate an increase in their technology budgets this year.

The focus is no longer on building bigger teams, but on building more effective ones

Innovation isn’t just about tools. It’s about people driving them.

Luis de Freitas, Director & Managing Legal Counsel at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), underscores the importance of leadership buy-in when adopting tech.

Once leadership is invested, you can go to the team and share all the information, says de Freitas.

With executive backing, legal can embed tech like AI into core workflows, shifting from reactive support to strategic enabler.

Teams aren’t just buying tools, they’re building them. Temitayo (Ty) Ogunade at GWI is training AI-powered Slack chatbots to answer common legal questions, freeing up time and helping the wider business self-serve.

Meanwhile, Algolia's Corporate Counsel, Alex Love, uses generative AI not just for shortcuts, but for strategic ideation:

At Palantir Technologies, Commercial Legal Lead Laura Dietschy is taking a bespoke approach. Her team uses retrieval-augmented generation to combine AI with internal data systems, tailoring outputs to the business’s real challenges.

"The core bit of our approach," she says, "is integrating the model with the organisation's information systems." She makes space for scaling efforts during quieter work cycles, showing that innovation needs not just budget, but dedicated time.

The bottom line? Legal teams are becoming technologists, connectors, and problem-solvers.

They’re blending legal expertise with cross-functional thinking to drive business value—often in very visible ways. Whether it’s automating document review, enabling instant legal FAQs, or contributing to product scrums, these forward-thinking teams are finding creative ways to stretch every tech dollar—and redefine their role in the process.

Legal technology budgets are expected to increase this year

Find out more about pairing legal research with AI

Communication with other departments is less effective as it was two years ago, in-house counsel say.

In April, 2023, more than half (54%) of in-house counsel believed communication with other departments was effective.

Two years on and this has dipped to only two-out-of-five (39%) in-house counsel agreeing or strongly agreeing.

Most in-house counsel believe communication could be more effective

To strengthen relationships with other departments, Cheryl Gale, Head of Legal at children’s audio speaker, Yoto, emphasises the importance of being solution-focused.

Instead, the approach is often about finding alternative solutions or suggesting a 'not yet' scenario, hence where the creative element comes into play.

Gale explains that when a firm 'no' is necessary, it is respected because of the trust and rapport built over time.

Aligning the legal function with the business's product pipeline, go-to-market activities and commercial objectives means demonstrating adaptability.

This can be reflected in the top leadership traits that legal leaders need. Pragmatic and agile (45%), good communicator (44%), commercially savvy (41%) were the top traits.

Pragmatism and agility are the most in-demand leadership traits

Legal teams should strive to be as visible as possible, using tools like Slack channels as a legal front door to facilitate direct communication with different departments, says Gale.

This visibility is not just about being present; it's about being recognised as a key stakeholder. Gale shares that the business acknowledges the legal team's role from the outset, allowing them to be involved in various projects and even in coining project names.

By being actively involved in conversations about product development and customer experience, legal teams can anticipate customer needs and align legal solutions with business objectives, she says.

Setting time aside to get involved in product meetings, or being a part of project teams and go-to-market activities, will not come easy. However, being a part of the discussion, and positioning legal as a stakeholder rather than a checkbox, will ensure you're able to help the business make more strategic decisions on things big and small.

Finding new ways to add greater value to your organisation through technology is a must. But this can only realistically be achieved if bulky, time-consuming tasks are streamlined internally.

One area ripe for innovation is the drafting and reviewing of legal documents. Many tasks such as formatting, sense-checking, and spell-checking can be automated to save a huge amount of time.

Since our last survey in 2023, we can see the amount of time in-house legal teams are spending on document reviewing has dropped. More than a third (38%) of respondents said they are reviewing legal documents in 2023. This dropped down to 21% in 2025.

Only one-fifth said they spend too much time on legal document reviewing

The legal team at BCG is currently testing several AI tools, one of which automates the contract review process, says de Freitas

By automating these tasks, in-house legal teams can focus on more complex and strategic issues, thereby increasing their overall productivity and value to the business.

One of the most exciting aspects of AI integration, according to Dietschy from Palantir Technologies, is the shift in the role of junior lawyers. Traditionally, junior lawyers were tasked with drafting documents, which were then reviewed by senior colleagues.

However, as AI becomes more embedded in organisations, this process is evolving.

Dietschy explains:

This shift represents a significant change in the skill set required for junior lawyers, who will need to develop expertise in working with AI tools and providing feedback to improve their outputs. Dietschy views this change as an exciting opportunity for junior lawyers to engage with technology and enhance their roles within legal teams.

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Managing and mitigating risk is still a huge part of the legal function, and will continue to be.

This is clear just by looking at the top challenges facing in-house legal teams in the next 12 months. Continuing demands of compliance regulations (51%), and keeping up to date with changes in the law (50%). It's got risk written all over it.

Keeping up with changes to compliance and the law are top concerns

But businesses now not only need your help avoiding risk, they need your help steering them in the right direction.

Looking at some of the risks of legal innovation, one recurring occurrence is the tendency to purchase point solutions and apply them indiscriminately to business problems, says Dietschy from Palantir Technologies.

Additionally, it is essential to have subject matter experts (SMEs) or enthusiasts within the legal team who can test and refine legal tools, suggests BCG's de Freitas.

Love from Algolia stresses the importance of understanding the terms and conditions of the AI vendor.

"Really get to understand that tool, understand the terms and conditions of the vendor that you're using."

This includes assessing how the tool handles data, whether it trains on user data, and the confidentiality measures in place.

While technology investment and advancement come with an element of risk, real value-add will come when taking risk assessment to the "so what?" level. Solutions over problems, of course, always resonate better in a commercial setting.