Analysis of Australian legal professionals’ experiences with artificial intelligence (AI) within their legal tech stack, based on sentiment captured between September 2024 and September 2025, reveals an adoption journey that began with strong enthusiasm, was disrupted by critical product failures, and has since stabilised into a more mature, evidence-based pattern.
Key stats you need to know
- September 2024 established a baseline of curiosity and exploration. Legal professionals expressed future-focused interest in seeing artificial intelligence at work.
- March 2025 showed friction among users adopting AI in their legal tech stacks. Users report system instability, hallucinations, and inability to deliver basic tasks as promised.
- By September 2025, a balance between positive and negative experiences with AI is forming, where both advocates and detractors coexist.
From curiosity to cautious optimism
Legal professionals were asked about their experiences with AI through Agile Market Intelligence’s Brand Intelligence, a quarterly survey that tracks impressions of legal tech platforms used in the Australian legal industry. Qualitative analysis of the sentiments shared regarding AI from September 2024 through September 2025 reveals distinct shifts as practitioners moved from theoretical interest to hands-on experience.
September 2024 captured practitioners in exploration mode, experimenting with AI features newly introduced to their legal tech platforms. Commentary reflected cautious interest, but remained forward-looking, instead of current performance:
“Interested to see how AI will be adopted to improve the tool.”
“Helpful but still expensive and produces some of the same answers as free AI software.”
"Interested to see the advancements in AI."
By December 2024, lawyers expressed stronger sentiments as more hands-on experience split the market into distinct camps. Early adopters became enthusiastic champions or strong rejectors. Organisational risk management also began overriding individual interest as firms implemented blanket policies restricting AI use.
“Love the AI feature! Very helpful, perhaps one of the best AI programs for work.”
“AI is a plague.”
"No-AI office policy."
March 2025 marked a ‘crisis’ period. Fundamental product failures dominated commentary, with practitioners reporting system instability, hallucinations and inability to perform promised tasks. The excitement from last year almost disappeared as users experience AI hallucinations and the failure of AI tools to handle documents.
"It is so bad that I do not believe an AI program is behind it. I suspect there to be a sham. It cannot read documents... If you ask it a basic legal question the response is usually so vague or inaccurate I need to go to Google."
"Extremely limited document uploads... cannot accurately do basic economic loss calculations... when you ask on what basis, it is incapable of telling you why."
June 2025 showed early recovery. Daily usage patterns emerged among satisfied users, while others remained disappointed. Practitioners who found tools that worked began integrating them into daily workflows, and have learned to manage their expectations. Legal professionals also start differentiating between stand-alone or general purpose AI from professional-grade or AI tools embedded in their legal tech platforms. Sector-specific tools start gaining credibility.
“[I] Use it everyday and it saves me time.”
"I use it but you have to be careful what data you feed it."
"Trusted AI research for legal context. Given its affiliation with [brand name], this tool appears more trustworthy than ChatGPT or other free AI tools."
In September 2025, the market appears to have stabilised. Positive and negative experiences now coexist, indicating fragmentation rather than uniform progress. Satisfied users emphasised ease of use, quality of the output, and consistent performance. Meanwhile negative feedback stems from being more aware of security concerns on sensitive data, rather than just outright rejection.
“Brilliant and time-saving.”
“Works so well as an AI, and better than CoPilot.”
“I avoid all AI products.”
The 12-month evolution of user sentiment demonstrates how a mismatch between innovation speed and product readiness can create lasting market segmentation. Platforms that prioritised quality over hype became successful in building a sustainable user base, while those that rushed their rollouts created permanent detractors. The journey from September’s curiosity through March’s crisis into September’s cautious optimism reveals that the Australian legal profession now approaches AI adoption with evidence-based evaluation, rather than just an outright rejection.
About the research
Agile Market Intelligence’s Brand Intelligence is a tool that guides expert marketers on their journey to achieving clarity over their marketing spend and to help them position their business for growth. It is designed to capture insights that allow you to track your brand over time while capturing on-demand insights.
This analysis draws on qualitative feedback from Australian legal professionals across five quarterly surveys conducted between September 2024 and September 2025, capturing responses from legal professionals in private practice and corporate counsel. All surveys included open-ended NPS comment questions about legal technology products, from which AI-related commentary was extracted and analysed thematically.
