State of In-house 2025

We spoke to more than 150 lawyers to uncover the true State of In-house in 2025. Get the real picture in this report.

In this report we uncover the State of In-house in 2025, based on conversations with more than 150 lawyers. Over the next few weeks, we’ll reveal the findings and share expert commentary below.

‍Survey cohort: to prepare this report, the Juro community team asked 160 in-house lawyers more than 30 questions on a range of topics.

Respondents from more than 20 countries, including the UK, US and most of the EU participated. Job titles included CLO, GC, Head of Legal, Senior Legal Counsel and a range of others. 52% of respondents are the most senior lawyer at their company.

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1. Under pressure: stress, burnout & resourcing

Nobody pursued a legal career thinking it would be a stress-free walk in the park. But looking at the data gathered for the State of In-house 2025, we have to ask ourselves: is this what in-house legal was supposed to be?

Let’s remind ourselves of how the World Health Organization defines burnout:

Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions:

feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job; and
reduced professional efficacy

When we asked our respondents, they told us:

23.3% have experienced burnout in the past year
15.1% are burned out right now

Traditionally, lawyers moved in-house partly to regain their work-life balance, having worked in the often stressful environment of a top-tier law firm. If lawyers are pursuing in-house careers, only to find a similar challenge to their wellbeing, what’s going wrong?

We asked Annmarie Carvalho ‍, lawyers' therapist and author of an upcoming book on lawyer psychology, for her take:

"While many lawyers seek out in-house roles in the hope that they will provide a better working environment than private practice, this report’s findings demonstrate that that isn’t necessarily the case," says Annmarie.

"For people with insecurities and who tend towards having an external locus of evaluation, like many lawyers, being the in-house lawyer in a climate of redundancies and layoffs is extremely tough. Although law firms can be hothouses for stress, the structures and being around many other lawyers, all who understand the pressures you’re under, may be protective in some cases against burnout. Whereas for the in-house lawyer, who may be isolated or one of only a few and who faces the pressure of being ‘the expert’ in the organisation, this is the not the case."

Although law firms can be hothouses for stress, the structures and being around many other lawyers, all who understand the pressures you’re under, may be protective in some cases against burnout

"Finally and though they might vary in degrees of effectiveness, law firms in recent years have been under pressure to bring in wellbeing measures. It’s possible such measures may not have filtered through so much to in-house roles."

It’s not just that legal teams are more likely to be flat, or shrinking, than growing. It’s also fallen to lawyers to shoulder much of the burden of the layoffs and reductions in force that have become an unfortunate reality across much of the tech industry in recent years.

With the era of cheap money giving way to a period of inflationary pressures, in-house lawyers have been on the front lines of difficult decisions and processes related to teams beyond their own. Layoffs are a fact of life for almost all businesses, and the focus is rightly on those employees at risk of losing their jobs.

In these difficult moments, lawyers must empathise and communicate transparently with colleagues; but they also have a job to do, and a professional obligation to do it well and follow the right procedures.

Michael Haynes, General Counsel at Juro, has experienced force reductions at a range of companies. He advises that "As lawyers, our role here is critical."

"Sure, we need to make sure that the company does the layoff lawfully and that employees' rights are respected. But a high quality legal team can also make that process as smooth and as dignified as possible for everyone involved."

A high quality legal team can also make that process as smooth and as dignified as possible for everyone involved

When we add this all up, we see stress moving in the wrong direction:

32% of lawyers feel more stressed than a year ago, compared to 19% who feel less stressed
Worse, those lawyers who are the most senior at their company are 3 times more likely to feel more stressed than less stressed

There are plenty of external events in recent years we can look to, when it comes to stress increasing for in-house lawyers: the COVID pandemic, wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, inflationary downturns, and the shock to various business models of the AI revolution.

But there have also been advances in the profession that should have alleviated some of these pressures: the maturation of legal operations as a discipline; increased market understanding of best practices; and of course a proliferation of automation and AI solutions.

We must then ask ourselves the tough question: has automation failed? Or has it failed to be adopted to a degree that could materially change this picture? What is the true state of AI adoption amongst in-house legal teams?

Stay tuned for those findings next week.

2. The State of AI adoption

Ever since the landmark Goldman Sachs report claimed, almost two years ago, that this is not a drill and indeed AI is coming for half of legal tasks, the pace of change has been remarkable.

To keep this grounded in the State of In-house, according to our survey respondents, then if workloads and stress are increasing but team sizes aren’t, lawyers need to find alternative resources to pick up the slack.

ALSPs are one; law firms are another (more data on law firms coming next week). But AI solutions of one kind or another are being widely adopted by forward-thinking legal teams, to ease pressure on their workloads.

Starting with some basics:

Although there are more surprising findings below, it’s worth pausing for a moment to reflect on just how quickly and widely generative AI has been adopted. More than 90% penetration in a couple of years is phenomenal.

99% believe it will change their job a year from now (44% significantly). Only 28% are concerned about long-term job security, and 73% see the proliferation of AI as a net positive, presenting great opportunities.

What benefits are teams realising?

The top three benefits legal teams are realising from adopting generative AI, according to our data, are:

Saving time
Handling more work without adding headcount, and
Enabling business teams to self-serve on legal tasks

With these benefits in mind, the next finding is perhaps not shocking. We asked the senior lawyers being surveyed who they report to, and overwhelmingly (76%) the answer was either the CEO or CFO.

We then asked: what is your boss’s attitude to you using AI for your work?

69% chose ‘do more of it’
24% chose ‘start doing it’
Only 7% chose ‘stop doing it’

This means legal teams have a clear mandate from their CEOs and CFOs to increase their use of AI solutions. 93% of in-house lawyers believe their boss wants them to use AI more than they are currently.

Juro CFO, Andy Hodgson, agrees. He said: “With emerging AI it’s more realistic than ever to automate repetitive or administrative tasks, freeing up teams to focus on higher value work. That means incremental investment into automations will come before incremental investment in people. It will be the back-office and support functions, Legal included, that will feel this pressure soonest and hardest.”

Incremental investment into automations will come before incremental investment in people. It will be the back-office and support functions, Legal included, that will feel this pressure soonest and hardest

So how are legal teams responding to that pressure?

Here’s the current state of AI adoption when it comes to core activities:

Legal Activities Table

	Legal research	Drafted a clause	Draft an entire contract	AI contract review	AI redlining
I've done this in the last 12 months	83%	79%	24%	58%	31%
Considering doing this in the next few months	25%	29%	52%	40%	61%

It’s great to see the wide adoption of AI for legal research and drafting. However for certain tasks - particularly redlining - lawyers are still reluctant.

Why is redlining so hard? The big difference vs text interpretation tasks is really the amount of context required to do that job well. If we compare extraction, if AI is asked to find an effective date on a vendor contract, it doesn’t really need any context other than the document itself.

There are probably some numbers and letters that look like a date, near to the words ‘effective’ and ‘date’, or some simple reasoning that relates back to a date, and AI can figure it out.

But to redline a contract well, there’s so much you need to know:

your organisational risk appetite
preferred fallbacks
financial and commercial information
the limits of what you’re allowed to agree
supplier power
house drafting style

… and so on. Even nuanced factors like the real or perceived bargaining power of each side can have a material impact on how you mark up that document. We need to see progress on the maturity curve before redlining moves significantly from lawyers to AI.

Everyone is still learning

Given the volume of articles written, podcasts published and videos shared about AI in legal, you’d be forgiven for thinking everyone is an expert and every overhyped term is widely understood.

But the reality is that lawyers still find some of the key concepts confusing:

The commonly cited frustrations that are holding legal teams back from adopting new technology are:

Trust
Accuracy
Business adoption
Change management

It’s clear from these findings that if vendors want in-house teams to endure the change management required to adopt new ways of working, we have work to do in making the concepts involved clear and widely understood.

A counterpoint that’s either comforting or alarming, depending on your viewpoint, is that lawyers don’t think regulators understand AI either:

Finally on AI, we took the opportunity to explore the unintended consequences of the AI revolution.

53% believe that AI risks making lawyers less capable and knowledgeable, as it can automate verbal reasoning and written tasks
52% are concerned about AI’s impact on the environment, yet their companies are doing nothing to address it

The impact of AI on skills, training and education, and the environment, could easily merit reports of their own. For now we can say with certainty that we’ve barely scratched the surface of the changes to society that could be catalysed by AI.

Next week: where do law firms fit into this picture?

3. Are law firms delivering?

So far we’ve covered how in-house teams headcounts and resources are faring, and the wellbeing and mental health consequences of increased pressure.

We’ve covered how forward-thinking legal teams are adopting and experimenting with AI solutions to deliver their work, with both the blessing and encouragement of their C-suite executive colleagues.

But how do law firms fit into the picture? Does the pace of innovation in private practice match the pace of innovation in-house, and are businesses feeling the difference?

It’s important to call out that ‘law firms’ aren’t a monolith. Everything from the quality of advice to the service levels, billing, use of technology and commercial awareness can vary from firm to firm - even those who look outwardly similar.

With that in mind, we asked our 160-lawyer cohort to consider the top 100 law firms, to gauge the current market sentiment regarding ‘BigLaw’ - particularly amongst the legal teams at technology companies.

We asked what level of value for money those top 100 firms offer, on average, in your recent experience. Respondents said:

2%: excellent value for money
53%: good value for money
41%: poor value for money
4%: terrible value for money

The majority therefore feel positive about top-100 law firm value for money. But it’s a narrow majority. And 45% rating value for money as poor or terrible is an awfully large disgruntled cohort.

Respondents gave qualitative feedback on why they left negative scores. The top four themes were, in order:

Overpriced services
Poor-quality advice
Advice that lacks commercial relevance
The outdated hourly billing model

Here’s a flavour of the qualitative feedback from senior lawyers we surveyed:

The cost inflation in recent years means that it is increasingly difficult to justify spend on outside counsel for anything other than mission critical pieces of advice

High hourly rates for inexperienced staff

The quality of work produced does not warrant the cost charged. The traditional billing structures need to be relooked

Pricing should be value-based, not hourly-based

An anonymous GC responding to the State of In-house survey

Why aren’t more in-house lawyers seeing the value?

Underlying these findings may be a fundamental challenge to the traditional unit of value upon which legal commercials have always been based.

While the end of the billable hour has been heralded many times over the years, it remains stubbornly persistent within law firms, in the UK and particularly in the US. But according to our data, 19% of respondents have replaced outside counsel with AI solutions for a task in the past 12 months, and 34% are considering doing so in the next six months.

That’s a lot of billable hours disappearing from the balance sheet.

If the law firm response is to increase billing rates, to protect profit margins, then their clients are likely to push back, move work in-house, lean on AI - or perhaps all three. Data suggests this is not a matter of if or indeed when - it's already happening.

Juro CEO & Co-founder, Richard Mabey, said:

"In an environment where AI is redefining value in the legal industry, AI-driven solutions and alternative providers are proving that high-quality legal work doesn’t have to come with excessive fees or inefficiencies. As budgets remain tight and workloads grow, in-house teams are making smarter choices and rejecting the old model that no longer serves them."

Join the conversation on LinkedIn by subscribing to Brief Encounters.

4. The State of legal technology

Legal technology is hot again. Legal work is a great fit for generative AI; as a result, waves of new solutions, new features and new applications are hitting the market and driving a pace of change that we’ve rarely seen before.

But in-house legal teams’ expectations are rising too. Many lawyers have been around long enough to remember the overpromising and underdelivering that accompanied previous AI developments in legal.

So how are attitudes to legal technology changing? How is adoption going, and what’s holding legal teams back from making a success of technology implementations?

What frustrates you about legal technology?

In response to this question, respondents identified the top frustrations with legal technology to be:

Cost (chosen by 57.5%)
Poor adoption (43%)
Lack of functionality (41%)
Poor user experience (39%)

Cost is always a difficulty for legal teams, who, as we’ll see below, often struggle to carve out dedicated budget for their team.

But adoption is clearly a key concern, and a familiar one. If a senior lawyer goes out to bat for budget from their CFO, then puts in the hard work to select the right vendor, it can be hugely frustrating to see that work wasted when the solution fails to be adopted.

We followed up by asking respondents who thought legal tech was too expensive to give a reason as to why. The top three selected were:

Legal teams don’t have much budget (chosen by 69%)
We have to pay for features we don’t need (40%)
Its features don’t justify the change management (37.2%)

Whether due to the historic ‘cost center’ reputation, or for some other reason, legal teams can still struggle to carve out budgets of their own. Many companies have tightened their belts in the last few years, making software spend harder to come by.

How can legal technology vendors do better?

We discussed above that law firms need to reflect on dissatisfaction amongst their customers, and in the same spirit it’s worth taking a moment to think about how technology vendors can do better.

Our key takeaways for technology vendors:

Make it incredibly easy for prospective customers to see the value of your solution, and convey it to their internal stakeholders
The most powerful technology solution in legal is useless if nobody adopts it, so vendors should prioritise a white-glove and extremely responsive approach to implementation and adoption
In a market flooded with hyped point solutions, user experience still matters - perhaps more than ever.

It’s an exciting time to be an in-house lawyer, with AI enabling incredible leverage for lawyers to automate routine work and spend their time on high-value tasks. It’s our privilege at Juro to do our part in driving that change.

Juro is the #1-rated CLM for user adoption and quality of support, according to independent G2 reviews. Get in touch here to find out more.