If you follow legal technology news, you could be forgiven for thinking that AI-powered legal research and contract analysis are the most pressing problems facing law firms today. The investment dollars certainly suggest it. But a closer look at how lawyers actually spend their time tells a different story.
Recent research highlighted by legal technology commentator Stephen Embry in Above the Law points to a striking imbalance. Around 70% of legal tech investment flows toward tools that address roughly 40% of what lawyers do. The other 60% of lawyers' working hours, the administrative and operational work that keeps a practice running, attracts a fraction of that attention and funding.
The implications for law firms choosing technology are significant.
This article draws on ideas from Stephen Embry, "Mind The Gap Between What Lawyers Need And Many Vendors' Focus," Above the Law, January 14, 2026, which references research findings by Hwang Jae Hyuk, founder of AdminLess.AI. All content paraphrased and cited with attribution. No reproduction of original text.
There is an important difference between legal tech built for general use and platforms built around how law firms actually work
NuLaw is a cloud-based legal case management platform designed to address the full picture of how a law firm operates, not just the parts that attract venture capital. The gap described below is real, and understanding it is the first step to making better technology decisions for your practice. Here is what the research tells us.
1. Lawyers spend most of their time on work that technology mostly ignores
According to the research Embry cites, lawyers and legal professionals spend around 60% of their time on administrative work: organising files, managing billing and collections, handling intake, processing payments, and verifying outputs. Most of this work is non-billable. It consumes the day without directly serving clients or generating revenue.
The remaining 40% is the work most attorneys went to law school to do: legal research, analysis, and the intellectually demanding tasks that require genuine expertise. This pattern is broadly consistent with findings from Clio's annual Legal Trends Reports, which have tracked non-billable time across the profession for years.
The work that consumes most of a lawyer's day is the work that receives the least attention from the technology industry.
2. Investment is chasing the wrong 40%
The research identifies a clear mismatch. The majority of legal tech investment targets tools focused on legal research, contract analysis, and e-discovery, all of which sit in that 40% of lawyer time. Only a handful of established platforms focus on the administrative 60%.
This is not simply a matter of priorities. It is a structural problem. Generative AI tools, which dominate current investment, are genuinely well-suited to some tasks but still prone to errors, inaccuracies, and the kind of hallucinations that require careful human review. Applying them to high-stakes legal research, where accuracy is non-negotiable, introduces risk. Applying automation and standard AI to routine administrative tasks, where the processes are predictable and the outputs verifiable, is a much better fit. Yet it is the latter that attracts far less funding and attention.
3. The shiny tool problem is real
Part of what drives this gap, Embry argues, is that administrative automation simply is not exciting. Billing workflows, intake processes, and file management do not generate headlines. Generative AI tools that promise to revolutionise legal research do. Investors follow the narrative, and law firms are left navigating a market where the loudest vendors are not necessarily solving the most pressing problems.
This matters for purchasing decisions. A tool that automates document review sounds transformative. A tool that eliminates two hours of daily administrative work per attorney is arguably more valuable to the average practice, but it is harder to sell and easier to overlook.
4. The right question to ask any vendor
The gap in the market points to a straightforward test for evaluating any legal technology. Does this tool address a real pain point in how our firm operates day to day, or does it address a problem that sounds important but affects a smaller portion of our actual working time?
Lawyers are trained to be sceptical, to question claims and look past surface-level presentations to the underlying substance. Embry's point is that this same analytical rigour should be applied to technology purchasing. Vendor claims deserve scrutiny. Promises of AI-powered transformation should be weighed against the concrete question of which hours in the working day this tool actually improves.
What this means for your practice
At NuLaw, we have built our platform around the full reality of running a law firm, not just the parts that make for good investor decks. Case management, matter tracking, milestone automation, and practice administration sit at the centre of what we do because they sit at the centre of what consumes a law firm's time.
The goal is straightforward. If attorneys are spending 60% of their time on work that does not require their legal expertise, that is 60% of the day where the right technology can make an immediate and measurable difference. That is where we focus. And that is where the real opportunity for law firms lies.
The most important technology decision a law firm makes is not which AI research tool to subscribe to. It is whether the platform running their practice is actually built to support how they work.
