legalbenchmarks.ai – Preliminary Findings, September 2025 – Full Report: “Executive Summary – Many legal teams today face an undeniable challenge: how to deliver more with less. Contract drafting, a cornerstone of legal value, remains one of the most time-intensive parts of legal work, and lawyers have already turned to AI to extend their capacity. Our findings reveal the following: Our findings reveal the following:

• 97% of lawyers use AI tools for legal work, making AI usage nearly universal in the legal profession.
• 83% of lawyers use two or more AI tools, reflecting active experimentation across multiple platforms and solutions.
• 35% of lawyers use legal AI tools, showing awareness but limited and fragmented adoption despite a crowded market of entrants.

With lawyers experimenting across general and legal AI, the critical question is how these tools actually perform in contract drafting. The answer is not straightforward. Contract drafting is both an art and a science: there is rarely a single “correct” draft, only one that is “fit for purpose” in context. Yet within that subjectivity, lawyers share common unspoken standards for what makes a draft robust, or “way off.” This benchmarking report introduces a framework for measuring those unspoken, subjective standards. It translates subjective judgments about draft quality into quantifiable metrics, making visible the elements of professional legal standards and testing how both AI solutions and human lawyers measure up. We focus on three important dimensions of a tool’s usability for contract drafting – whether the outputs are legally and factually sound (Output Reliability), the extent to which they aid lawyers in delivering a good working draft (Output Usefulness), and how well the platform itself supports context, verification, and day-to-day workflow (Platform Workflow Support)…”