Nearly 8 in 10 plaintiff law firms have tried AI. Only 3 in 10 use it regularly.
That distance, between the firms that have touched AI and the firms that have built it into how they work, is the real story of AI in plaintiff law right now.
When 78% of firms say they have engaged with AI, it sounds like an industry that has already crossed over. It hasn't. Here is how that 78% breaks down across every firm we surveyed:
- 30% use AI regularly. It is a normal part of how they work.
- 23% are experimenting. They are trying it on some tasks, not committed.
- 25% are evaluating. They are looking, not yet using.
- 22% have no plans. It is not on the roadmap.
So the "8 in 10" headline is really one group of firms that has embedded AI and a much larger group circling it. Most firms are aware of the potential but stalled somewhere short of practice.
Why the gap matters more than the adoption rate
Two years ago, the question plaintiff firms were asking was whether to use AI. That question is settled. The technology is accessible, the interest is real, and the urgency is measurable.
But interest has no impact. A firm where a few attorneys occasionally paste something into a chatbot and a firm where AI is built into how cases get worked are not two points on the same curve. They run their practices differently. One gets a little faster on individual tasks. The other changes how quickly cases move from the front door to settlement.
That is why the 30% figure matters more than the 78%. It does not measure how much AI a firm is aware of. It measures how many firms have actually closed the distance between curiosity and practice, and most have not.
How we measured AI adoption across 207 plaintiff firms
We didn't want to add to the pile of opinion and hype, so we put numbers to it. Supio partnered with Thirdside Research to survey U.S. personal-injury attorneys and firm leaders about how AI shows up in their day-to-day practice: who is using it, where in the case it is being applied, and what is holding the rest back. We fielded the survey between March 11 and 26, 2026, and grounded the findings in outside sources, including Stanford RegLab research, the Charlotin AI Hallucinations Cases Database, court sanctions records, and carrier AI platform documentation. It is the same question nearly every firm asks us: what are other firms actually doing with AI, and what does success look like?
What plaintiff firms that use AI regularly do differently
The most surprising part of the data: the firms in that 30% are not necessarily using more AI than everyone else. They are using it differently, at a different point in the case, in a way the other 70% are not.
That difference runs through the entire study. The 2026 State of AI in Plaintiff Law report breaks down adoption by role and firm size, what the regular-use firms do differently, and what the gap is costing the firms on the wrong side of it.
Source: Supio, 2026 State of AI in Plaintiff Law: The AI Adoption Gap. Survey of 207 U.S. personal-injury legal professionals conducted by Thirdside Research, March 2026, supplemented by Stanford RegLab research, the Charlotin AI Hallucinations Cases Database, court sanctions records, and carrier AI platform documentation.