As 2025 continues to roll out, there has been a fair share of economic uncertainty. These concerns are a catalyst for all organizations, large and small, to re-evaluate how they do business and improve revenue. Law firms are actively seeking ways to pursue more business, increase efficiencies and scale their ability to create more pitches and proposals, to ultimately win more clients.
The 2025 QorusDocs benchmark survey reveals valuable takeaways on how law firms are looking to win accounts and drive up revenue, all without adding more resources. This year’s respondents represented organizations of varying sizes—the majority with more than 1,000 employees and greater than $100M revenue (2023). The survey includes a focus on service industries (e.g., professional services, legal, technical services) with legal services representing approximately 24% of all responses.
This year’s report provides some thought-provoking statistics and actionable insights designed to help law firms rethink about how they’re managing the flow of RFPs and creating pitches, proposals and RFPs to win new client business.
So, what did we glean from the 2025 survey?
Top 5 Law Firm Insights
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The Volume is Turned UP!
RFP Volume: While 82% of respondents in the legal industry experienced stagnant RFP volumes in 2023, this year brought better news. The number of RFPs and proposals law firms are being asked to produce year-over-year (YOY) is going up.
Our 2025 respondents also said that they personally work on an average of seven RFPs per month, with the majority working on anywhere from one to nine RFPs in a month. Most of our legal respondents are experiencing gains of six to 10 RFPs per month.
Pitch Volume: Within the 54% of organizations that reported a YOY increase, a significantly greater percentage of respondents from the legal services industry (67%) experienced a pitching volume increase, while 33% reported that volume remained steady. When getting into the granular pitch data across industries, legal respondents tended to pitch more frequently, averaging 13 pitches per month compared to the total average of eight monthly pitches.
“QorusDocs has been critical to the success of our team members working on pitches. We’ve been able to increase productivity and connect our activity to outcomes. And with better data, we can understand and improve our assignment process, content needs, and the variation of requirements across our global offices.”
Senior Executive, Law Firm
Actionable Insight: As law firms see a rising number of YOY and monthly pitches, the question proposal professionals in the industry are asking is this: how do we scale? As our Ray Meiring has noted, “Automating routine tasks with AI can reduce lawyers’ workloads by up to 23 percent. This efficiency gain enables them to focus on strategic and complex legal work that requires human insight and creativity. “ (Read “Why Your Law Firm Can’t Afford to Sleep on AI.”)
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Shrinking RFP Opportunity Size
RFP opportunity size in the legal sector shrunk in 2024. Forty-two percent of law firms and legal services organizations reported average opportunity sizes in the $500K–$1M range—a decrease from 2023 when 50% of legal respondents reported $1M–$5M opportunities. The median RFP opportunity size for legal respondents was $750K.
Actionable Insight: Make sure every opportunity has its best chance of landing the deal. Explore how to create pitches, presentations and RFPs that win.
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More People Needed
From across the industries we surveyed, tech services had the fewest number of employees involved in responding to RFPs, with a median of 8 people. At the other end of the spectrum, legal and professional services organizations reported a median of 13 employees.
Even with a higher number of employees, completion times appears to be trending longer, with the 2024 and 2023 levels both greater than nine days, on average—up from an average of six business days in 2022 and seven days in 2021.
Actionable Insight: While there is no doubt that law-related RFPs can be complex, the higher number of people and longer completion times appear to indicate that the legal industry could be more deeply mired in manual processes. Law firms should review their pitch and proposal workflow to see how automation and AI tools can get people out of the muddy waters of repetitive, mundane tasks and focused on the higher value work that moves the dial on their organization.
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Top Law Firm Challenge: Starting from Scratch
Last year, across all industries, creating new content from scratch was the most common challenge (58% of respondents), however this year’s major challenges bid and proposal teams faced when working on requests in 2024 centered around collaboration and content creation and management—and the lack of efficiency inherent in those processes.
However, things are a little different for law firms. Respondents from Legal organizations (67%) ranked creating content from scratch/getting started as the major hurdle in their response process. And, the content wrangling doesn’t end there. In equal amounts, law firms are also struggling with the time spent locating, organizing, updating content.
Some industries (we’re looking at you, AEC!) are taking advantage of GenAI to locate and organize content as well as optimize content generation tasks, such as researching and summarizing content, writing bios, executive summaries and copy blocks, and answering RFP questions.
In contrast, the majority of legal organizations reported not using GenAI yet, although some have started using the technology to answer RFP questions and research, summarize, and write copy.
Actionable Insight: Law firms have traditionally been a little slower to adopt new approaches or technologies. There is no doubt this is changing. In fact, a recent survey showed that AI adoption skyrocketed from 19% to 79% in a one-year period. Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? Here’s the rub: The number that have embraced AI is just 8%. The vast majority (34%) say they have adopted it only minimally and 21% say they have adopted it partially.
To overcome this content creation hurdle, law firms must fully take advantage of GenAI tools, like QPilot, to bring together attorney bios, experience summaries, practice descriptions, industry expertise, capabilities and boilerplate firm information and use AI templates to quickly format everything into useful drafts. (And that’s just a starting point!)
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Technology as a Transformation Lever
It probably comes as no surprise that within the industry breakouts (legal, professional services, AEC, IT services), Microsoft 365 was preferred by 93% of survey takers, and specifically Microsoft Word for proposal work. (It should be noted that legal organizations showed off their rebellious spirit by splitting their choice equally between Word and PowerPoint this year.)
Microsoft Copilot was also the platform generative AI choice across all industries surveyed (professional services, legal, AEC, technical services). In the “right tools for the right job” department, a whopping 92% of legal respondents reported using proposal management software at their organization—a 27% increase over 2023 usage. This is excellent news as technology, like AI-driven RFP software is transformative. It can relieve the stress of manually answering RFPs, vastly improve productivity and give you the data analytics and velocity required to boost win rates.
Actionable Insight: Proposal software for QorusDocs with QPilot, can be a gamechanger for your firm’s business development strategy. Given the widely-accepted 50%-70% efficiency gains delivered by GenAI—in alignment with the time savings and capacity increase we’ve seen in the 2024 survey and across the QorusDocs customer base—organizations, on average, can add an estimated $21M to their gross income.
Get More Insights
To explore key takeaways and discover more actionable insights for law firms that will help you boost the performance of the response process and win more client business, check out the comprehensive 9th Annual Proposal Management Survey here.
Intrigued about how a purpose-built proposal management solution that is AI-driven can help you? QorusDocs works with dozens of top law firms to erase manual processes of completing numerous pitches and RFP responses. Book a demo to see how you can complete critical business documents and ensure consistency for your process.
