At a large firm, a committee decides. In a legal department, legal ops evaluates and the business often signs. Four 2026 surveys show who holds the pen.
Vendors like to talk about “the buyer” as if one person signs every legal tech deal. Four surveys and reports published this year suggest that is rarely true. At a large law firm, the decision runs through innovation leaders, a security review and firm management. In a corporate legal department, legal operations increasingly runs the evaluation, while the general counsel sets the priority and the wider business may own the purchase. Knowing which room you are in changes how a tool gets bought, and how fast.
How Large Firms Decide
The 2026 ILTA Technology Survey, as reported by LawSites, covered more than 500 law firms representing 140,000 lawyers. It found 94% using or exploring generative AI, up from 80% last year. The most common tool was not a legal product. Microsoft 365 Copilot led at 76% of firms, followed by CoCounsel and Claude at 44% each and Harvey at 43%.
Firm size changes the picture. Among firms with 700 or more lawyers, Copilot was at 88% and Harvey at 84%, with Claude at 64%, Legora at 47% and CoCounsel at 43%. Among firms with fewer than 50 lawyers, Harvey fell to 22% and Legora to 6%. Large firms tend to run several tools at once, which means the real buying decision is less about picking one product than about which ones survive a pilot and get rolled out.
Who makes that call? A Bloomberg Law report on its Leading Law Firms survey describes it as a management question as much as a technology one. Jane Rogers, a member of Ropes & Gray’s management committee, called build or buy a business decision. The firm’s chief information officer, Marsha Stein, explained why the firm chose to buy.
“The technology is changing so quickly now that it doesn’t appear to us at this point that doing something proprietary makes sense,” Stein told Bloomberg Law.
That line between building and buying is not fixed. On October 29, OpenAI published a case study saying Ropes & Gray is developing a proprietary transactional diligence tool in partnership with OpenAI. A firm can buy platforms and still build on top of them, which means the vendor in the room is often competing with the firm’s own engineers as well as with rivals.
Bloomberg Law’s data also shows why large firm deals take time. Roughly 67% of large firms reported spending under 2% of their 2025 budgets on building or buying new technology, while subscriptions and recurring costs took far more. Nearly 30% of firms with fewer than 500 attorneys spent more than 5% on new technology. Firms categorized their own spending, so treat the figures as rough.
Scale also changes who has leverage. Offit Kurman’s chief innovation officer, Alex Finkel, told Bloomberg Law that beyond the top 50 firms, “the build-versus-buy selection or strategy is not applicable to anyone.” Large firms, by contrast, said they can shape products before launch. For a mid-size firm, the practical buyer is usually a small group choosing among subscriptions, not a committee weighing a custom build.
How Legal Departments Decide
In-house, the pattern is different. Thomson Reuters’ 2026 Legal Department Operations Report says 28% of general counsel named technology their top strategic priority for 2026, twice the share in 2025. It describes legal operations as the function that evaluates technology and now owns much of the governance and shadow AI risk.
The report is candid that authority varies by company.
“Some ops leaders reported that they are generally empowered to make AI purchasing and operational decisions, as long as they’re accountable to the GC’s office,” the report says.
Others told Thomson Reuters that their department’s AI use is tied to the wider business, with the legal department handling procurement and operational concerns. In practice that means a vendor selling to a legal department may need three yeses: the general counsel’s priority, legal ops’ evaluation and the company’s own IT or procurement process.
Budget approval is getting easier. The Legal Tech Pulse survey of more than 250 senior in-house lawyers, run by Legal Business with Thomson Reuters and focused on the UK and Continental Europe, found 62% had an approved legal tech budget for the next 12 months, up from 48%. The share calling business buy-in “quite” or “very” easy rose to 31% from under 20%, while those calling it “not very easy” or “almost impossible” fell to 21% from 43%.
Why the Two Rooms Meet
The two buyers are linked. Among corporate legal leaders responsible for purchasing decisions, the Thomson Reuters report found 68% would consider changing an outside law firm that was not delivering clear AI value within five years, and 11% say they are already reconsidering some relationships for that reason. A firm’s tool choice is partly a response to what its clients’ legal ops teams are asking for.
For vendors, the lesson is to map the room early: who runs the pilot, who signs the security review and who controls the budget line. For buyers, it is to write down who decides before the demo, not after.
Common Questions
Who signs off on legal tech at a large law firm?
Usually a group. The surveys point to innovation and IT leaders, firm management and a security review, with tools tested in pilots before any firm-wide decision.
Does legal ops make the buying decision in-house?
Sometimes. Thomson Reuters found some legal ops leaders are empowered to buy AI tools while others work through the wider business’s procurement process.
Is it getting easier to win budget for legal tech in-house?
The Legal Tech Pulse survey says yes: 62% of respondents had an approved budget, and fewer called buy-in hard than a year earlier.
Verdict
Partly Real. The data shows a clear split: committees and security reviews at large firms, legal ops plus the business in-house. The surveys rely on self-reported answers, so test any claim about who decides against the actual approval path at your organization.
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