The State of Winning Work in Law Firms
How marketing, business development, and proposal teams are competing for new work — and where the system is breaking down.
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Executive Summary
Law firms are being asked to win more work than ever — and the teams responsible for winning it are running an increasingly outdated play. Across marketing, business development, and proposal leaders of Am Law 100, the Am Law 200, and NLJ 500 firms, one pattern dominates this year's benchmark: proposal demand is climbing sharply while the data and processes that proposals depend on are not keeping pace.
The result is a widening gap between the volume of opportunities firms pursue and their confidence that they can pursue them well--and most illuminating, a growing number of firms that simply lack the time or resources for pursuit.
This is because proposal teams are drowning in an avalanche of RFPs, and at the very moment volume is spiking, the experience data they need is often hard to find or missing from the source system altogether, and spending a disproportionate share of their time on manual “hunting expeditions” just to assemble the facts a response requires.
The Numbers Behind The Story
69%
of firms saw proposal valume rise — none reported a decrease
86%
describe their process as mostly manual or a manual-tech hybrid
27%
are actively using AI in proposals today
Taken together, these findings describe a profession that is competing harder for new business with tools built for a slower era. The firms in this study are not short on ambition or opportunity — they are short on trustworthy, findable, reusable experience data and solutions that can seamlessly format the information into a brand compliant submission.
That is the constraint sitting underneath nearly every frustration respondents reported, and it is the constraint that shapes what they say they will buy next: when asked what would justify investing in a new solution, the top answers were reduced manual work (60%), better win rates (48%), and better data accuracy (44%) — outcomes, not features.
Artificial intelligence enters this picture as promise more than practice. Only 27% of firms are actively using AI in proposals today, and half say less than 10% of their process is automated. Where AI is in use, it is concentrated in drafting and rewriting — accelerating the first draft — rather than in the experience-retrieval problem that respondents identify as their deepest pain.
When AI is adopted, it tends to live in a patchwork of disconnected tools rather than one integrated workflow, so teams still copy and paste between systems and wrestle the output back into a brand-compliant format — slow, cumbersome work at exactly the moment the clock is tightest.
Adoption is gated less by skepticism than by trust: the biggest barriers are data security and the absence of clear ROI, and the qualities firms weigh most when evaluating tools are accuracy, ease of adoption, security, and integration. AI will earn its place in this market by being dependable and well-integrated, not by being novel.
The opportunity this benchmark reveals is therefore foundational. Before AI can reliably draft a winning proposal, firms need a trustworthy, centralized, searchable record of who they are and what they have done. The firms that fix the data layer first will be the ones positioned to turn rising proposal volume from a source of strain into a source of advantage.