Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowArtificial intelligence use has exploded in corporate America, but measuring the return on investment in that technology or monitoring misuse has proven less popular.
A recent survey from the Association of Corporate Counsel highlights this contrast.
Eighty-five percent of in-house legal departments use AI, up from 52% just a year ago, according to the survey. The association also found that 39% of legal departments do not formally track the return on investment, and 41% of legal departments have never audited for unapproved “shadow AI” use and do not plan to do so.
Association CEO Jason Brown said he doesn’t find the contrast completely surprising, given how quickly legal departments must move to keep up with AI developments.
“In an attempt to continue to engage and innovate, get [the] benefit of these efficiencies that you’re seeing in real time, you keep plugging in and keep doing more, figuring, ‘OK, we’ll have to get this on the back end,’ or ‘We’ll have to build this car while it’s moving in order to get there,’” Brown said.
The association’s survey of 576 in-house legal professionals globally from the 2026 report, “The In-house Legal AI Landscape,” largely mirrors what’s happening at local companies The Indiana Lawyer contacted.
Although many companies are expanding AI use and adding to their guidelines for the technology, formal ROI tracking and governance aren’t happening yet, in large part because use of the technology is still new and evolving.
AI use shows promise for attorneys, companies
Attorneys who use AI in their everyday practices said that although the core responsibilities of their jobs have not changed, the technology can assist when time or resources are limited.
In-house counsel don’t have billable hours — and therefore aren’t paid based on the amount of time they spend on a task — so AI can help when attorneys need to learn several different tasks they have to perform for a client in a short amount of time, said J. Scott Enright, general counsel at Emmis, a marketing and media company.
AI stands out for helping attorneys draft, analyze and identify patterns across documents, he said. And for smaller companies, AI can act as a helpful thought partner for in-house attorneys who don’t have several coworkers to consult.
Enright emphasized that AI doesn’t have the ultimate say.
“If you’re doing due diligence, it can be very helpful in helping to identify key things that are good and key things that are problematic,” he said. “I don’t think you rely on that exclusively, but it’s a really helpful second check.”
When telecommunications company Telamon first issued its AI policy, the company was more focused on emphasizing AI’s risks, said Dan Strunk, general counsel. A year later, the company takes a more enthusiastic approach.
“We realized that if we were making the business decision to lean in and really embrace the benefits of high-quality AI tools, that it needed to be framed as an opportunity and an expectation, not a risk that needed to be managed and avoided,” Strunk said.
Across the business, Telamon uses AI tools such as Claude Enterprise for different needs depending on the focus of its employees. That includes organizational needs, communication and the more basic parts of their jobs. Strunk said that with basic tasks like data processing out of the way, employees have time to focus on deeper analysis.
Measuring misuse
More than half of the respondents to the association’s survey said their companies have an AI governance committee that oversees use and misuse. These committees may include members of the legal department but are not composed solely of legal professionals.
Emmis has had an AI governance policy in place for about a year, but it doesn’t actively track AI misuse. Much of the company’s focus is on educating employees about how to use AI so misuse is avoided.
“We know everybody’s using it, but [Emmis] tries to provide guidelines and really says you should be using the tools that we have purchased,” Enright said.
For those handling the most sensitive company data, Emmis takes care to ensure that employees understand how and where that information can be used. Beyond that, tracking individual AI use or misuse is tricky, depending on whether employees are working on their phone or personal computer, Enright said.
The company controls what it can, putting limitations on its computers for the AI models employees can access, Enright said.
The challenge of calculating return
Although 92% of respondents to the Association of Corporate Counsel’s survey agreed anecdotally that time saved is the best outcome to measure AI’s success, most legal departments aren’t formally tracking that.
The companies The Indiana Lawyer spoke with are smaller than those surveyed by the Association of Corporate Counsel, and their plans vary in how they monitor AI success and misuse both within the legal departments and throughout their companies.
Telamon has a companywide AI governance team of several leaders who manage the rollout of AI tools. That team performs a return-on-investment analysis of AI, and the legal team’s AI use is considered in that analysis. But it’s too soon to tell what kind of return AI is generating, Strunk said.
“Through that group, they are able to measure aggregate usage, so not just, how much are we paying for AI, but how much are people actually using it?” Strunk said. “Is it a lot of little projects versus intensive use on some bigger projects? We’re really pretty early into our adoption, and so ROI is not driving our decisions at this point.
“But we’re gathering information because we expect that it will be.”
Enright said Emmis is also not tracking the return on investment in AI across the company. But he said business leaders appear to be pleased with the speed at which employees can accomplish jobs at a reasonable cost for the AI tools.
It’s difficult to track how much time in-house counsel spend on various tasks (since they don’t track billable hours). That means there’s also no way to track how much time is saved compared with tasks performed by AI.
However, even if they’re spending the same amount of time on tasks, lawyers may feel like they’re doing the tasks better with the technology, Brown said.
“I believe that I’m becoming a better lawyer because I’m in the weeds and discovering things and asking more questions and providing better, more exacting advice because I’ve gone through the meaty stuff very, very quickly,” Brown said.
The challenges of measuring returns so far have done little to slow the growing popularity of AI use among in-
house attorneys.
“All the tools that you talk about that legal are using, AI has become the one that literally everybody is talking about,” Brown said. “They’re shocked if people aren’t [using AI], if people are like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m not there yet.’ They’re like, ‘How are you not?’ Because this is where everybody’s gonna be.”•
Please enable JavaScript to view this content.