55% of Victorian lawyers now use AI, but only 26% cut fees

More than half of Victoria's lawyers — 55% — now use AI in their work, up from 37% a year earlier, yet only 26% have passed efficiency gains on to clients through lower fees. Those figures come from the 2026 census of 2,221 lawyers conducted by the Victorian Legal Services Board and Commissioner's legal services research centre, and they capture a profession absorbing generative AI faster than it can monetise the change.

The survey, one of the largest snapshots of AI adoption in an Australian legal market, also documents a counterintuitive effect: clients who consult chatbots are increasing, not reducing, the workload of their lawyers.

What does the census actually show?

AI use among Victorian lawyers rose from 37% to 55% in the last year. The 2025 report had found adoption highest among lawyers under 30; by 2026 that age disparity had largely disappeared. Usage remained low only among lawyers aged 60 and over.

Practice area shaped adoption sharply:

• Trade practices led at 85%.
• Banking and finance followed at 78%.
• Information technology and telecommunications also reached 78%.
• Criminal law sat at the bottom at 29%.
• Family law reached 45%.
• Administrative law reached 46%.

The tooling picture is striking for an industry that has built its own AI products. While legal-specific AI tools exist, 79% of lawyers reported using consumer chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Copilot. Legal-specific tools alone were used by 22% of respondents. The profession has largely adopted general-purpose assistants rather than purpose-built legal software.

Why have fees barely moved?

The census found that AI adoption has not translated into fee reductions for most practitioners. Just 26% of lawyers said their AI use had resulted in lower client fees.

The gap widens by client type. Lawyers serving business clients reported reduced fees at 34%, compared with 23% among those serving individual fee-paying clients. A smaller group — 18% — reported AI had enabled them to take on work that would previously have been uneconomical.

The principal researcher and report co-author, Dr Georgie Rychner, attributed the corporate-fee difference to the nature of commercial clients. "They have a high level of legal capability," she said. "They also are perhaps using AI in their own work, so they have a better understanding and are able to advocate for lower prices … whereas we're not seeing that as much in the community legal system sector."

Rychner also offered a second explanation: the efficiency gains themselves have disappointed. In 2025, she noted, the survey found 89% of practitioners had taken steps to verify the accuracy of AI output — and that verification work may have negated the gains.

That finding matters beyond Victoria. If 89% of lawyers check what the model produces, the labour saved on drafting returns as labour spent on review. The billable hour survives not because lawyers refuse to change but because checking AI is itself billable work.

Are clients' chatbots making things worse?

The 2026 census records a rise in clients conducting their own legal research with AI, and the results burden the profession. Some 46% of lawyers reported clients arriving with inaccurate or misleading information about their legal problems, and 41% reported clients presenting AI-generated documents that required correction.

The net effect on workload is negative. Nearly half of lawyers said client AI use increased the time and effort required on a matter, against 19% who said it reduced time and effort.

"What we are hearing is that clients are more frequently arriving with misleading or inaccurate information about their legal problems, more so than they're arriving with a better understanding of legal problems," Rychner said. She added that more research was needed to understand client perspectives.

The pattern carries a consumer-protection dimension. Clients who trust chatbot output may act on wrong advice, then pay a lawyer to unwind the damage — a cost that falls hardest on individuals rather than repeat commercial buyers of legal services.

How have courts and regulators responded?

Courts and legal practitioner bodies across Australia have been grappling with AI use among lawyers and the public since 2023. The enforcement record is now taking shape.

A Victorian lawyer last year became the first in the country to face sanctions for false citations discovered in court filings, stripped of the ability to practise as a principal lawyer. Regulatory bodies in Western Australia and New South Wales have launched investigations in similar cases.

The federal court issued new rules on the use of generative AI in April. The chief justice of the high court, Stephen Gageler, said last year that the use of AI-generated content in legal cases had reached an "unsustainable phase".

Those interventions frame the census findings. A profession where 79% of practitioners use consumer chatbots, and where nearly half field inaccurate AI-generated material from clients, sits squarely in the path of judicial scrutiny.

What is the so-what for the legal market?

The Victorian census quantifies a shift that regulators and clients can no longer treat as marginal: a near-20-point jump in adoption in one year, fee pass-through concentrated among corporate clients, and client-side AI producing correction work rather than savings. With verification already standard practice — 89% of practitioners in 2025 — and courts issuing formal AI rules, the next round of the census will show whether the 26% who cut fees become the norm or remain the exception.