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Key takeaways:

• • • Corporate legal AI strategies should start with business goals, not just efficiency — While many corporate law departments first adopt AI for internally-focused use cases, the bigger opportunity is to align AI with broader business priorities such as revenue growth, risk reduction, and improved operational performance.

    • GCs should measure AI success by business impact — Metrics such as time saved and tool usage help, but stronger AI metrics connect legal work to business results. In contract review, for example, success may be reflected in improved win rates, reduced revenue leakage, faster deal completion, or dollars of risk avoided.

    • A strong legal AI strategy should produce multiple forms of business value at once — The most effective approaches do not focus on a single benefit such as cost savings. Rather, they aim to improve service delivery, strengthen operations, support growth, and reduce risk across the business.

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Over the past several years, corporate law departments have begun to rapidly adopt AI tools, often spurred on by company-wide AI initiatives. In fact, in just the past year alone, department-wide AI adoption has risen to nearly half (47%) of all departments, according to respondents surveyed for Thomson Reuters Institute (TRI) research.

However, it’s not enough to simply adopt technology. For AI to truly make an impact, it needs to be integrated strategically. In taking this strategic approach, however, GCs and other legal department leaders are still in the early stages.

According to findings from TRI’s 2026 State of the Corporate Law Department Report, more GCs are focused on technology than ever before. When asked their top strategic priorities over the next year, 28% answered that technology was a top priority, double the portion that prioritized technology just one year ago. And out of those mentions of technology, a vast majority specifically referenced AI as a primary area of focus.

Historically, many legal departments have thought about AI from an internal efficiency standpoint, leveraging it to perform their work quicker and cheaper. Increasingly, however, C-Suites are looking to their legal departments to provide more effective business counsel and connect legal analysis to business outcomes — and, not surprisingly, they’re expecting AI to play a role in that shift.

So how can GCs effectively make AI a priority not only for the legal department but also for the entire business? It starts with broadening the potential impact of AI processes.

From unlocking to deploying capacity

Still less than four years since the public release of generative AI (GenAI) tools through ChatGPT, many corporate legal departments are still in the early days of rolling out the technology. As a result, most GenAI use cases still tend to focus on low-hanging fruit such as document summarization and review, contract drafting and review, research, and more.

This is understandable from an individual use case standpoint. The problem is, when these use cases are translated to the leadership level for overall strategic guidance, many GCs remain focused on how to maximize the gains from that low-hanging fruit. According to TRI research, less than 20% of corporate law departments measure return-on-investment from AI at all, meaning many departments are using AI tools without any sort of guiding measurement around what success should look like. And even among those departments that are measuring AI success, most of the metrics they use center around internal department usage or department cost savings from the tool.

Those measurements are more helpful than no tracking at all, to be sure. They focus on how AI is unlocking capacity for the legal department and look for ways that attorneys can perform their work more efficiently than before. Indeed, the majority of legal departments that have invested in AI tools are currently at this point.

However, there is an additional step that legal departments need to take in order to full take advantage of the strategic value of AI. And that is connecting AI’s use to that of larger business goals by deploying the capacity it has unlocked. This requires thinking about AI less in terms of how it will impact the legal department, and more in terms of how it will impact those that the legal department serves.

For example, take a common AI use case such as contract review. Currently, the most common measurement around contract review technology is speed, such as how quickly the legal department can help a contract go from start to signature. Maximizing that value can improve the efficiency of the department, to be sure. But C-Suite partners aren’t necessarily looking for an efficient department as the end goal — they’re looking for business success.

As a result, some forward-thinking GCs are looking to connect AI usage directly with business goals or revenue. For contract review, that could mean demonstrating the impact on overall contract win rate, or whether close rates increased through use of AI. Or it could mean more successful revenue leakage protection; and it could even mean risk avoidance, measured in dollars of risk avoided. All of these can demonstrate value and be connected to the rest of the business.

Further, all of this requires close collaboration with other business units, both in terms of sharing metrics as well as understanding what success throughout the organization should mean to all parties. That said, GCs have told TRI for countless years that breaking out of a silo is a top priority for the legal department. In this case, AI implementation should be no different.

Wide areas of impact

As it currently stands, corporate law departments are seeing the most impact from AI in areas of efficiency and time saved. More than three-quarters of GCs who have talked with TRI say that AI is either currently benefiting the department’s efficiency and productivity, or that they’re expecting those benefits to occur within the next 12 months.

Connecting AI outcomes with business imperatives provides more areas of improvement, however. In this year’s State of Corporate Law Department Report and elsewhere, TRI breaks down the law department’s role into four key functions that we call the four spinning plates:

1. 1. 1. Provide effective legal services and operational excellence
      2. Offer efficient legal value within budget
      3. Enable business and strategic growth, and
      4. Protect the business’s assets and competitive advantage.

AI’s impact on efficient legal value is clear; but GCs are beginning to see that it can actually impact all four of those plates.

Those GCs looking to adopt AI as a strategic goal should be aware that said strategy should encompass more than simply internal efficiency. Not all of these benefits will be applicable to all departments, but all departments should be considering more than just one of these areas. An effective AI strategy should have multiple benefits in mind — and as such, it should take into account multiple business factors when measuring the success of the department’s AI strategy.

Entering into an AI strategy is a laudable goal for today’s GCs, but also not a light undertaking. When thinking about how AI will impact the department, leaders should take the next step beyond deploying capacity into unlocking capacity, helping attorneys not only work more efficiently but also make a bigger impact on the business at large.

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