In-house legal teams have lived through wave after wave of change. Leaner budgets. New tools. Promises of productivity gains. Yet the picture from our Q4 2024 survey, conducted in partnership with Above the Law, is blunt: most legal professionals are still spending the majority of their day on work that doesn’t need their legal expertise.
That’s the finding. And it has real consequences for the organization, not just the people doing the work.
How legal professionals actually spend their days
The survey data is consistent across department sizes and sectors:
- 6% of respondents say their day is almost entirely admin work
- 28% feel overwhelmed by administrative tasks
- 55% are somewhat overwhelmed
- Only 12% spend most of their time on high-level legal work
Nearly 9 in 10 legal professionals are not spending the majority of their day on work that uses their expertise. A separate survey by Rev found that 49% of legal professionals spend 7 or more hours per week on administrative or non-specialized tasks. Finance had its digital transformation decades ago. HR and Sales followed. Legal is the last major corporate function still running largely on email threads and shared drives — and the cost is now visible. leads to numerous internal challenges: whether on the moral side or in terms of inefficiency.
The three tasks eating the most time
Our survey identified three specific activities where time loss is most acute.
Managing emails and repetitive legal questions
31% of respondents spend at least 8 hours per week handling internal questions over email. Many of these are recurring — the same question types, from the same teams, arriving through an unstructured channel with no triage system. The result is constant context-switching between low-impact conversations and work that actually requires legal judgment.
Handling internal contract requests
32% of respondents spend more than 8 hours per week on internal contracts. Sales-related agreements are the most common. The core problem is that requests arrive without the context legal needs. Back-and-forth begins before the contract is even opened. A task that should take hours turns into days. Business teams wait. Timelines slip..
Searching for digital files
34% of respondents spend 2 to 4 hours per week just locating documents. Not reviewing them. Not analyzing them. Finding them. When basic information isn’t accessible without a search, the daily friction adds up fast.
Still managing legal requests over email? See how in-house teams use structured intake workflows to cut response times and free up hours each week. Explore DiliTrust Matter Management.
What this costs the organization
The consequences reach well beyond individual frustration.
A legal counsel at a mid-sized company spending nearly two full days preparing a simple vendor contract approval isn’t an unusual story. Those two days consumed by incomplete intake information, scattered files, and manual approvals could have been spent on a regulatory change with actual business impact. The time doesn’t come back.
When legal teams are stretched across low-value tasks, three organizational patterns emerge:
Legal is perceived as a bottleneck. The Association of Corporate Counsel notes that legal teams making the shift from perceived bottleneck to business partner consistently point to process improvement and automation as the mechanism that makes that shift possible.
Skilled people disengage. 21% of respondents in our survey cited administrative work as the single most frustrating part of their job. High-talent professionals running repetitive tasks lose motivation for the harder work they were hired to do. A 2024 Axiom survey found that 46% of satisfied in-house lawyers were actively job hunting, with workload pressure cited as a primary driver.
Legal falls out of the business conversation. When response times are long and capacity is limited, other departments stop consulting legal early. Decisions move forward without legal input, and risk builds without anyone catching it.
Why technology alone hasn’t solved it
Legal departments have invested in tools. The survey results show the investment hasn’t translated into meaningful relief.
Part of the reason is structural. Legal has no system of record the way other functions do. Contracts live in email threads. Entity data sits in spreadsheets. Requests arrive ad hoc. AI tools can’t do much with information that’s unstructured and siloed across different systems.
The other part is adoption. Thomson Reuters’ 2026 GCO 2030 research found that most legal departments have some AI activity underway but remain stuck in incremental adoption — improving existing processes slightly rather than redesigning how work actually flows through the function. Individual tools get adopted. The underlying workflows stay the same.
Technology changes what’s possible. Process redesign is what changes how people work.
Is your legal team ready to move from reactive to strategic?
Download our survey report to see how legal professionals rate their biggest productivity drains and what they’d change first.
Download the survey
Where legal teams are making progress
The teams that make real gains tend to follow a similar sequence. They map the problem before adding tools.
Step 1 — Audit your intake. Track where requests come from and how much time each type consumes. Email, chat, and verbal requests are invisible loads. Making them visible is the starting point for any meaningful change.
Step 2 — Standardize contract requests. Most contract delays happen before legal even opens the document. A standard intake form with required fields cuts the back-and-forth significantly. Business teams know what to submit. Legal stops chasing context.
Step 3 — Centralize documents. If finding a file takes 20 minutes, the problem isn’t search quality. Documents are scattered. A single accessible repository removes a daily friction point for everyone on the team.
Step 4 — Deploy tools on redesigned workflows. Technology deployed on top of broken processes automates the broken state. Fix the workflow first. Then support it with the right tools.
How automation changes the numbers
Once workflows are redesigned and supported by the right tools, the time gains are concrete. Here’s how manual and automated approaches compare on common legal tasks:
| Task | Manual Time | Automated with CLM & AI |
| Search for clauses | 1 to 3 hours | under 1 minute |
| Review expiration dates | 1 to 3 hours | 5 minutes |
| Validate contract versions | Up to 1 day | 6 minutes |
| Review complex contracts | 2 to 3 days | 10 minutes |
| Creation to signature | Weeks | A few days |
These figures come from what legal teams report after moving from email-based workflows to a structured contract management system. The hours freed up don’t disappear. Legal research. Strategic advising. Risk management. Those are the activities 50% of survey respondents said they want to be doing with their time.
What AI can actually do for legal teams today
The AI capabilities available to in-house legal teams are specific, not theoretical. The practical use cases are already deployed in working environments:
- Clause search and risk detection. AI scans incoming contracts against internal playbooks, flags deviating clauses, and suggests compliant alternatives without manual triage.
- Document summarization. Long agreements are condensed into structured summaries so reviewers focus on the sections that matter rather than reading linearly.
- Automated data extraction. Key contract metadata (parties, dates, obligations, renewal dates) is pulled automatically, removing the tagging work that slows contract processing.
- Email-to-matter intake. Legal requests arriving as unstructured emails are routed automatically, assigned to the correct workflow, and tracked from day one — without anyone building a spreadsheet to manage them.
- Natural language querying. Teams can ask questions across the full contract portfolio in plain language and get immediate answers, without exporting to spreadsheets or running manual reports.
Lini, DiliTrust’s proprietary AI engine, covers all of these capabilities across the Governance Suite. It’s built entirely in-house, which means legal data stays within the organization’s environment rather than passing through third-party AI providers.
Free resource: legal department efficiency assessment A practical framework for identifying where admin work is hiding in your department and which workflows to address first. Download the assessment
Frequently asked questions about legal teams and administrative work
Technology reduces friction within individual tasks, but it doesn’t automatically fix the workflows around those tasks. In most organizations, tools are adopted without first mapping where time goes or why certain requests keep arriving the same way. Without addressing process design alongside tooling, new software tends to sit alongside old habits. Our survey found that 83% of legal professionals still feel overwhelmed by admin work despite the tools they have access to.
Handling internal contract requests is the most time-consuming area, with 32% of legal professionals spending more than 8 hours per week on them. The core problem is back-and-forth caused by incomplete intake information. With a structured CLM in place, clause searches drop from 1 to 3 hours to under a minute, and version validation from up to a full day to around 6 minutes. The time savings matter, but so does predictability: business teams know when to expect a response, and legal can plan its week.
Change management is where most legal tech rollouts succeed or stall. Frustration with admin work is high, but that frustration doesn’t automatically translate into willingness to change tools or workflows. Legal leaders need to build internal support before go-live: map current pain points with the team, identify internal champions, and set clear expectations about what the tool will and won’t solve in the first 90 days. Skipping this step typically results in low adoption, with teams reverting to email within a few months of launch.
The perception problem is largely a capacity problem. When legal spends most of its time on formatting, approvals, and repetitive requests, it can’t respond quickly to work that genuinely needs legal judgment. 50% of survey respondents said they’d prefer to spend their time on legal research and strategic advising. Closing that gap requires reducing low-value task volume through structured tools and making legal’s response time predictable enough that business teams consult legal early, before decisions are made. The DiliTrust Governance Suite gives legal teams the structure to handle routine work faster, freeing capacity for the advisory work that builds internal trust.
See how DiliTrust helps legal teams get back to the work that matters Watch how in-house teams use the DiliTrust Governance Suite to manage contracts, matters, and legal workflows from a single platform.
