Chapter 0
Introduction
Top Identified Issues
within legal department processes
How are legal teams keeping pace with the business in 2025?
This year, legal teams are seen stepping up more as a strategic partner. But how well are we navigating this shift?
In-house legal teams are facing mounting challenges as their workloads grow while resources remain constrained. As this demand for legal support grows, in-house teams are being called on to do more than manage risk—they’re becoming strategic partners in driving compliance, efficiency, and business alignment.
To understand how legal teams are navigating this shift, we surveyed over 110 in-house legal professionals across the United States—primarily General Counsels, Chief Legal Officers and Legal Operations representing teams of all sizes and maturities.
Our report reveals a clear shift for 2025: moving toward automation, smarter intake, and better data visibility as the keys to legal’s transformation.
Inside this report, you’ll find:
Key findings
Over 76% of legal departments still rely on manual processes for managing their legal matters, highlighting significant inefficiencies and difficulties in how legal teams capture and track requests.
87+% of legal departments using these tools still face significant manual work and inefficiencies
Worse yet, over 45% of those with a CLM reported that they have zero coverage for non-contracting requests.
Only 10% of legal teams have significant automation in place. As a result, inefficiencies persist: 58% lose time to repetitive, low-value tasks, 44% are still manually creating, assigning, and updating legal work and 77% of teams still handle all or part of their reporting manually.
Top 2025 priorities across legal ops include streamlining intake and matter management (54%), reducing response times for legal requests (47%), and developing better metrics and KPIs for legal operational performance (37%).
Legal teams that improve tracking and reporting see measurable business impact, including faster decision-making, reduced legal risks, and stronger resource allocation.
BREAKING POINT
The role of legal is evolving, but our processes aren’t.
As companies face increasing regulatory complexity, cost pressures, and business transformation, legal teams are stepping into a broader role—supporting not only legal risk but also strategic initiatives and operational performance. The role of in-house legal teams is evolving, but many organizations continue to rely on outdated methods for managing legal work.
As legal teams are being asked to do more than ever, inefficient intake, fragmentated tracking, and poor visibility make it harder for legal to keep up, limiting their impact when it matters most.
TRANSFORMATION
Legal leaders are responding by solving their intake and reporting
In 2025, the top priorities across legal operations include streamlining intake and matter management (54%), reducing response times for legal requests (47%), and developing stronger, more comprehensive metrics and KPIs for legal team performance (37%). By leveraging automated intake, tracking, and reporting, legal teams can reduce manual workload, gain real-time insights into legal work, and significantly speed up response times, allowing them to streamline operations and support the business at scale.
