How AI Elevates the Employee Experience for Corporate Legal Teams—and Drives Economic Value

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As AI is poised to transform workplaces, employee engagement is falling, resulting in a real economic cost. For corporate legal departments, AI adoption presents a significant opportunity to increase department efficiency—while also improving employee experience and facilitating career growth.

In a new commissioned Total Economic Impact^™ (TEI) study, Forrester Consulting found that the Lexis+ AI legal research, drafting and insights solution delivered a 284% ROI over 3 years for corporate legal departments. In addition to this significant quantifiable impact, driven by time savings and reduced outside counsel costs, the Forrester study found that Lexis+ AI helped legal professionals work smarter and find more satisfaction in their roles, while maintaining the high standards of privacy, security, and accuracy required in legal work.

Employee Engagement is Falling as AI is Rising

According to research by McKinsey & Company, 92% of companies plan to increase their AI investments over the next three years. But there’s a gap: only 1% of leaders say their organization is “mature” in AI adoption—where AI is fully integrated into workflows and driving substantial outcomes. The impact of AI has yet to be fully realized across organizations.

This continued investment comes at a time when employee engagement with workplaces is beginning to falter. According to the 2025 State of the Global Workplace by Gallup, “global employee engagement fell, costing the world economy US $438 billion in lost productivity.” Gallup found that the primary driver of this trend was a drop in manager engagement, which in turn impacts employees. Managers are being asked to do more with less, as well as steer their teams through uncertainty and AI transformation.

The thoughtful adoption of AI in an organization has the potential to address these challenges, and as Forrester Consulting found, can even increase employee engagement.

The Human Side of AI Adoption

Lawyers and paralegals are highly skilled knowledge workers who spend significant time on work that is lower value than their highest potential.

In Forrester’s study of corporate legal departments, lawyers using Lexis+ AI saved 25% of the time they typically spend addressing legal inquiries, including conducting research and summarizing the findings for stakeholders. Paralegals cut time spent on administrative tasks—like document summarization—by 50%.

One interviewee told Forrester that they viewed “Lexis+ AI as a time-saving tool that enabled attorneys to end their workday or workweek sooner, thereby striking a better work-life balance.”

In short, AI enables professionals to focus more on practicing law, and less on managing workflows—improving their daily work lives.

Accelerating Onboarding and Upskilling

Lexis+ AI is also proving invaluable in onboarding and training.

In the Forrester study, the leaders of corporate legal departments interviewed agreed that Lexis+ AI had the potential to accelerate career paths for both current and prospective employees. Lexis+ AI can help new hires get up to speed faster, by allowing them to focus on legal work rather than internal processes.

“The assumption is that [Lexis+ AI] is going to allow those individuals to be more efficient in their work and it’s going to allow them to get up to a full caseload, faster." – AVP, Staff Counsel Operations, Insurance

Lexis+ AI can help current employees put greater focus on career-advancing work, improve the comprehensiveness of their analyses, and contribute at a higher level than before.

“When you don’t have to spend so much time summarizing the documents, you are freed up to spend time on other parts of the deal. You might catch something, or you might think about something that you wouldn’t have had the bandwidth to do if you were bogged down manually summarizing things." – VP of Legal Operations, Real Estate

With Lexis+ AI, legal departments can build agile, adaptable teams that grow with the evolving demands of legal work.

Increasing Job Satisfaction Through Smarter Tools

Having the right tools for the job matters. As one VP of Legal Operations at a real estate organization stated:

"[I assume having Lexis+ AI] would make the employee experience better, because a lot of your experience [as an employee] is about having the right tools to do the job, whether you’re a chef or in the legal arena.”

Today, for legal professionals, AI is one of those tools. AI simplifies routine work and unlocks time for meaningful, strategic contributions. Teams can increase their capacity without adding hours, improving job satisfaction and engagement.

Furthermore, legal departments face higher stakes than most when it comes to accuracy and confidentiality. Legal work has no tolerance for errors, and the privacy of company information cannot be compromised.

Lexis+ AI is built to manage these sensitivities through:

• Private cloud infrastructure and encrypted sessions
• Siloed user data with no cross-organization model training
• Responses grounded in trusted LexisNexis content

With Lexis+ AI, legal departments can introduce AI without sacrificing quality, privacy, or security.

Empowered Teams, Better Outcomes

Lexis+ AI can help move corporate legal departments along the AI maturity curve by embedding AI into core legal workflows, while meeting the unique requirements of legal work.

But empowering legal teams with AI is also enhancing employee experience. By reducing the time spent on administration and helping professionals focus on career-advancing work, Lexis+ AI not only improves efficiency but also drives employee engagement with AI. In a time of falling employee engagement, in part due to the uncertainty brought by the rise of AI, ensuring employee buy-in is critical.

With a thoughtful roll-out plan and comprehensive training, Lexis+ AI can help corporate legal departments realize the value of AI while also ensuring team members are supporting the transformation.

Explore the full Forrester TEI study to learn how Lexis+ AI is transforming corporate legal departments: lexisnexis.com/corporate-ai-roi