Findings from the May 2026 20Minds roundtable survey on AI in legal practice. Respondents rated confidence in four capability dimensions, ranked the case for and against building in-house tools, and assessed the plausibility of four scenarios for the future of legal work.
How confident are respondents that AI systems will, within a 2–3 year horizon, meet the threshold for material efficiency gains (40%+) across four dimensions? Scored 1–10. Click a row to see the full response distribution.
Respondents rated their confidence in making buy-or-build decisions for legal AI tools (mean 7.0/10), then ranked five reasons for and five against building in-house. Bars show Borda-count totals: each first-place vote contributes 5 points, second place 4, and so on.
Respondents rated each scenario for plausibility on a 1–5 scale. Click a card to read the full scenario description and see the response distribution.
Verbatim comments submitted alongside the capability ratings and scenario ratings.
Sample. Eighteen completed responses from the 20Minds roundtable survey, collected via Typeform in May 2026.
Scoring. Capability and buy-or-build confidence questions used a 1–10 scale, framed as "today, with a 2–3 year horizon, averaged across all legal use cases." Scenario questions used a 1–5 plausibility scale (1 = implausible; 5 = fully plausible).
Rankings. Respondents ranked five options for and five against building in-house AI tools from most important (1) to least important (5). Rankings are aggregated using a Borda count: first place receives 5 points, second 4, third 3, fourth 2, fifth 1.
Material efficiency gains. The 40%+ threshold is the working definition the roundtable adopted for "material" rather than "incremental" productivity improvement.
Caveats. Small sample. Findings should be read as indicative of roundtable participant sentiment, not as a representative survey of the legal profession.
On capability and confidence