More than half of Victoria's lawyers now use artificial intelligence in their work, and just over a quarter of them say it has made any difference to what their clients pay.
The 2026 census of 2,221 of the state's lawyers, conducted by the legal services research centre of the Victorian Legal Services Board and Commissioner, found AI use rising from 37% to 55% in a year.
Just 26% of respondents said their use of AI had resulted in lower client fees. Reductions were more common among those acting for business clients, at 34%, than among those with individual fee-paying clients, at 23%.
Lawyers also reported a new source of work: clients who seek advice from chatbots and arrive with errors that need correcting.
Use varies sharply by practice area. It is most common in trade practices, at 85%, followed by banking and finance and by information technology and telecommunications, both at 78%. It is least common in criminal law, at 29%, with family law at 45% and administrative law at 46%.
Most of the tools are not legal tools. 79% of lawyers reported using consumer chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Copilot, while 22% used legal-specific products alone.
The age gap has closed. The 2025 report found AI use highest among those under 30; this year that disparity had largely disappeared, although use remained low among lawyers aged 60 and over.
Some found new work rather than cheaper work. 18% said AI had allowed them to take on matters that would previously have been uneconomical.
Dr Georgie Rychner, the principal researcher and a co-author of the report, said fee reductions in corporate and larger firms could be explained by the nature of their clients, who are repeat users of legal services. “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 said the efficiency gains from AI were not as high as expected. She noted that in 2025, 89% of practitioners reported taking steps to verify the accuracy of AI output, which might have negated the gains.
That last figure is the whole of it. The machine does the work quickly, and then 89% of the profession checks whether the work is the work. Whatever time was saved is spent establishing that it was saved.
This newspaper proposes to call it the conservation of legal time. In any closed legal system the total number of hours is fixed. Technology cannot create or destroy them; it can only move them to whoever is verifying.
The census supports the law in both directions. Where the lawyer uses the chatbot, the hours move to checking its output. Where the client uses the chatbot, the hours move to the lawyer correcting the client. In neither case do the hours leave the system, which is why 74% of practitioners found nothing to pass on.
The 18% who took on previously uneconomical work are not a counter-example but a confirmation. Work that nobody could previously afford is now being done, at an unchanged total cost in hours, which is the behaviour of a conserved quantity finding somewhere to go.
That leaves the 26%. Under the law as stated, a reduction in one client's fees requires the hours to reappear somewhere else, and the Department of Unnecessary Research regards the matter as urgent. Somewhere in Victoria, a lawyer is checking something for nothing.