As 2026 gets underway, law firms are navigating a business environment that rewards speed, precision, and confidence. Often all at once! Economic pressure hasn’t reduced demand for legal services, but it has raised expectations.
Clients want more tailored responses, faster turnaround times, and clearer demonstrations of value, all while firms manage risk and margin more carefully than ever.
The latest QorusDocs benchmark survey highlights how legal services organizations are responding to these pressures. Proposal and RFP activity continues to rise steadily, and a significant portion of both new and existing business depends on formal responses. For law firms, missed opportunities aren’t just disappointing… they’re expensive.
This year’s survey includes legal organizations of varying sizes and specialties, and the findings paint a clear picture: legal teams are operating at sustained high volume, with complex coordination requirements, increasingly personalized pursuits, and growing reliance on AI to remain competitive.
So, what did we learn from this year’s benchmark?
Legal services teams continue to operate at one of the highest sustained proposal volumes of any industry. More than half of legal respondents (54%) report handling 10 or more proactive proposals per month, while 85% manage at least five RFPs monthly, including 15% handling 25 or more.
Growth remains steady rather than explosive. About 70% report year-over-year increases in proposal volume, and 73% report increased RFP activity, with most growth concentrated in the range of one to ten additional requests per month. The workload isn’t spiking, it’s compounding.
Time investment remains significant. Nearly half of legal respondents (48%) report that completing an average request takes six to ten days, reinforcing how resource-intensive these pursuits remain.
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Actionable Insight: Sustained volume creates cumulative strain. Legal teams that want to scale without burnout need to reduce friction in drafting, review, and coordination. Particularly where work is repeated across similar pursuits. |
Legal services organizations show one of the strongest dependencies on RFPs for revenue generation. Almost half of legal respondents (48%) report that 25-49% or more of new business revenue comes from winning RFPs. (And, an almost equal amount (46%) notes that over 50% of new client sales are a result of winning RFPs.) That reliance doesn’t stop once a client is won. For existing business, 74% of legal respondents report win rates of 50% or higher, highlighting how often formal proposals are required to retain and expand client relationships.
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Actionable Insight: When RFPs drive both acquisition and retention, consistency and quality matter as much as speed. Every response is a revenue moment, especially in long-standing client relationships where expectations are already high. |
Most legal opportunities sit squarely in the mid-market range. Fifty-nine percent of legal respondents report average RFP values between $500K and $5M. These are substantial pursuits, but they often come with tighter margins and higher scrutiny.
At the same time, capacity constraints persist. Fifty-five percent of legal teams report being unable to complete 10–19% of incoming RFPs, forcing difficult prioritization decisions and increasing pressure on turnaround times.
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Actionable Insight: When opportunity sizes are meaningful but not limitless, inefficiency becomes costly. Improving throughput and decision-making around which RFPs to pursue can have an outsized impact on overall performance. |
Legal services organizations tend to rely on large, distributed response teams. Only 6% involve five or fewer people in RFP responses. A majority (56%) involve 11 or more contributors, and 38% report teams of 21 or more. Notably, 16% of legal organizations regularly involve 50+ people in responses.
This structure reflects the need for deep subject-matter expertise, rigorous review, and customization—but it also increases coordination overhead, particularly when multiple practice areas or partners are involved.
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Actionable Insight: Large teams aren’t the problem, unstructured collaboration is. Centralized workflows, clearer ownership, and better content visibility can dramatically reduce friction without compromising quality. |
When it comes to operational challenges, personalization tops the list. Fifty-two percent of legal respondents cite the ability to personalize responses as their biggest hurdle.
That pressure is reinforced by content-related friction:
Timeliness suffers as a result, with 42% reporting difficulty responding quickly. Resource constraints exist, but are less dominant. Only 24% cite too few resources as the primary issue.
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Actionable Insight: For legal teams, the challenge isn’t just having content—it’s making the right content available to the right people at the right time. Centralization and smarter reuse are critical to maintaining quality at speed. |
Legal teams continue to rely heavily on traditional desktop tools. A full 61% use Microsoft Word as their primary application for final proposals and RFP responses, followed by PowerPoint (23%) and Excel (8%). Web-based tools remain limited at just 3% adoption.
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Actionable Insight: Any transformation effort must meet legal teams where they already work. Solutions that integrate directly into familiar tools—rather than forcing new authoring environments—are far more likely to succeed. |
Legal services organizations stand out for translating AI adoption into commercial outcomes, not just operational gains. While they report solid improvements in drafting speed and staff efficiency, they are also the most likely to link AI use to increased win rates or revenue.
Risk-oriented use cases are especially prominent. Legal teams consistently point to stronger response checking and risk flagging, reinforcing AI’s role as a second line of defense in high-stakes proposals.
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Actionable Insight: Legal organizations aren’t using AI just to move faster—they’re using it to compete more confidently in complex, high-value pursuits. Taken together, the pattern suggests a more balanced adoption model, where efficiency, personalization, risk management, and commercial impact reinforce one another rather than operating in isolation. |
This year’s benchmark makes one thing clear: legal services teams are operating in a high-stakes, high-volume environment where precision and personalization are non-negotiable. Firms that invest in better content coordination, integrated workflows, and AI-enabled support will be far better positioned to scale intelligently, without sacrificing quality or confidence.
To explore deeper insights and benchmarks specific to legal services, download the full 10th Annual Proposal Management Survey. And if you’re curious how an AI-driven, purpose-built proposal management solution can help your firm reduce friction, increase throughput, and win more business, book a demo with QorusDocs.