AI is helping in-house legal teams with repetitive work, but leaders interviewed for a new report say the time saved is being absorbed by more incoming material and new demands. The findings put a sharper question to businesses: can they measure the value of AI while keeping its costs and workload in check?
Watch Desk analysis
What happened
Silicon Republic published the report on 27 October with Dentons Ireland, drawing on interviews with legal and compliance leaders at companies including eir, Flipdish, Gilead Sciences, IMRO, Mastercard, Uniphar and Wayflyer.
Almost none of those interviewed said AI had replaced a role or function outright. They described gains mainly in repetitive tasks such as invoice review, contract checking and customer screening. At the same time, interviewees said AI-assisted drafting is adding volume to disputes, complaints, grievances and subject access requests, which still need people to assess and answer.
The report also finds that legal teams are struggling to demonstrate a clear return on investment. Some leaders worry that consumption-based, token-metered pricing will make bills harder to predict. Dentons’ global head of solutions development estimated AI costs could rise two- to fivefold within two years; that is his forecast, not a measured industry-wide result.
Why it matters
The story is more complicated than the familiar promise that AI will simply make teams smaller. Automating routine work may free up capacity, while also generating more material for people to review and respond to. The practical question is whether the new work creates value or just moves the queue somewhere else.
Cost measurement is part of that question. The leaders interviewed say many legal teams lack baseline metrics for comparing work before and after AI adoption, while token-based charges can make spending less predictable. Without both sides of the ledger, efficiency gains are easy to claim and harder to prove.
Our read
This is a useful, grounded account of AI adoption from the people expected to manage its workload and bill. It is an interview-based report, not a controlled study or a universal verdict on legal work. Still, the tension it surfaces is worth watching: AI can make individual tasks faster without making the whole function cheaper or simpler. If you are adopting these tools, track the work they remove, the work they create and the cost of both.
What to watch
- Whether legal teams establish baseline measures that let them assess AI’s impact.
- How token-based pricing changes budgets and access to AI tools.
- Whether AI-assisted incoming complaints and requests continue to add work for legal teams.
Discussion spark: When AI makes routine legal tasks faster but increases the volume of material teams must handle, what should count as a genuine productivity gain?
Sources and evidence
- Source update (27 October 2026, 09:32 UTC)
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