Highlights
- UK in-house legal teams face pressure from C-suite, business stakeholders, and their own technology expectations.
- 30% of professionals may leave within two years if employers don't provide adequate AI tools.
- One in five in-house teams will reconsider law firm relationships if efficiency gaps persist.
AI has moved out of the pilot phase and into the day job. For in-house legal leaders across the UK and Europe, that shift is arriving as pressure from three directions at once: the C-suite wants measurable return, the business wants legal to move faster, and legal teams themselves want better tools than they currently have.
That’s the picture from Thomson Reuters’ fourth annual Future of Professionals Report 2026, based on a global survey of 1,816 professionals across law, tax, audit, compliance, risk and global trade in 62 countries, and the companion action paper for corporate leaders, drawn from 404 professionals across corporate legal, risk, compliance, tax and the wider C-suite spanning 36 countries. For legal leaders inside UK corporates, the findings offer a useful mirror — and a clear set of priorities.
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Three pressures, one function
Outside counsel isn’t keeping up either
Choosing a direction, not just a tool
What this means for UK legal leaders
Three pressures, one function
The corporate action paper describes legal, tax, compliance, risk and global trade as “enabling functions” caught in a triple-header of pressure. Internally, business stakeholders want faster, better-informed decisions and expect those teams to keep pace with the rest of the organisation. In-house legal teams report feeling this most acutely of all corporate functions.
Financially, almost half of professionals in enabling functions say they’re already feeling, or expect within a year to feel, the budgetary consequences of moving slowly, at a time when workloads have long outpaced headcount.
And from within their own ranks, the pressure may be sharpest of all: 30% of professionals say they’d consider leaving their organisation within two years if their employer fails to close the gap between the technology they expect and the tools they have.
That last point should give UK general counsel pause. Nearly six in ten professionals say they lack access to properly vetted tools, and that gap is contributing to both attrition risk and a rise in “shadow AI,” the use of unapproved tools outside official channels. That’s a governance and compliance exposure, across the entire business, that legal teams can’t afford to overlook.
See what a purpose-built solution looks like
CoCounsel Legal gives in-house teams a properly vetted, fiduciary-grade tool rather than leaving them to rely on unapproved workarounds.
See it in action ↗Outside counsel isn’t keeping up either
The pressure isn’t only internal. As in-house teams push to get more value from new technology themselves, they’re holding outside counsel to a higher bar – and finding most firms fall short. Across the broader legal report, most corporate legal respondents say it’s very important or essential that their law firms demonstrate real efficiency, quality and innovation gains, yet only a small single-digit percentage believe their firms are delivering on this.
And the shift could be substantial: roughly one in five in-house legal professionals say they’ll reconsider a firm relationship within 12 months if that gap doesn’t close – a further one in ten are already doing so. For UK in-house teams managing panel reviews or renegotiating fee arrangements, this is a live consideration, not a distant trend.
Choosing a direction, not just a tool
The action paper sets out three broad directions organisations are taking, and none is inherently right or wrong – the risk is drifting without choosing one:
Elevate – routine work is handled by technology so legal capacity shifts toward judgement-heavy, strategic advisory work. The in-house counsel who moves from contract review to commercial advisory is the model example.
Scale – technology helps absorb a growing volume of matters without growing headcount. This prioritises efficiency and throughput, and maintains current working patterns.
Reimagine – workflows are rebuilt from scratch around what’s now possible, from shared data infrastructure to real-time dashboards, rather than layering new tools onto existing processes. This is the most difficult path, and the one with potentially the greatest return.
The paper is candid about the risk of an execution gap: legal teams often run on different tools and standards, and without coordination, good intentions fragment into inconsistent practice across the business.
What this means for UK legal leaders
The recommendation that comes through most strongly – and one UK general counsel and heads of legal are well placed to lead on – is that fiduciary functions should take the lead on organisation-wide governance and standards, rather than wait for direction to be handed down. That means pushing for access to properly vetted, fiduciary-grade tools, treating this as a multi-year journey rather than a single rollout, and using legal’s natural credibility on governance to shape standards the wider business can adopt too.
The gap between what’s expected and what’s delivered is real, but it’s also an opening. Legal functions that get ahead of it – on their own tooling, and on what they expect from outside counsel – are positioned to move from cost centre to strategic partner faster than most of the business around them.
Read the full Future of Professionals Report 2026 to see how your organisation compares.
