Future of Professionals Report

The Thomson Reuters Institute's Future of Professionals Report is the most-cited annual survey of AI adoption, productivity expectations, and pricing-model implications across legal, tax, and risk practice. Its value to Ohio attorneys is not its prediction — it is its quantification of the gap between firm-level AI strategy and individual- attorney AI use.

What the report measures

• Self-reported AI use by individual professionals (legal, tax, risk).
• Firm-level AI strategy presence (written policy, dedicated lead, vendor budget).
• Productivity expectations — how much time professionals expect AI to save them per week within 1, 3, and 5 years.
• Pricing-model implications — how firms plan to bill for AI-compressed work.

Persistent themes across editions

1. The individual is ahead of the firm. A larger share of attorneys report personal AI use than firms report having a written AI policy. The supervisory risk created by this gap is the report's most actionable finding.
2. Productivity expectations are high. Surveyed professionals consistently estimate that AI will save them double-digit hours per week within a few years. Firm leadership generally projects smaller savings.
3. The hourly model is under pressure. A growing share of firm leaders identify the billable hour as incompatible with AI-compressed work and anticipate movement toward value-based pricing.
4. Risk management lags adoption. Vendor due diligence, confidentiality protocols, and verification workflows are reported less frequently than the use itself.

Why this matters for partners and managing committees

The report quantifies the adoption curve in language partners and clients understand. If you need to persuade firm leadership to invest in a written AI policy, an enterprise-grade tool subscription, or a verification protocol, the Thomson Reuters data set is the most credible third-party reference for the conversation.

How this maps to COUNSEL

The report's headline finding — that individual use outpaces firm policy — is exactly the supervisory gap COUNSEL's Oversight and Supervision pillars exist to close. The framework gives leadership a written structure to deploy in response to the survey data.

Practitioner takeaways

• Use the report's data to benchmark your firm against peers of similar size and practice mix.
• If individual use at your firm exceeds firm policy maturity, treat that as a Rule 5.1 / 5.3 issue and accelerate the policy.
• The pricing-model findings are useful in client conversations about AI-compressed billing.

The latest edition of the report is available at the link above.