AI use is spiking across industries, according to a recent survey, which is potentially very good news for anyone in legal still stuck manually reading through old cases.

The results of RELX's 2019 Emerging Tech Executive Report released last week show that out of the 1,000 senior executives surveyed from industries such as health care, insurance, government and banking, 72% indicated that they were using AI in their business practices, a noticeable improvement over the 48% that reported the same in 2018.

Michael Lamb, group chief privacy officer at RELX, expects that a rising tide will continue to raise all boats—including legal.

"It's become clear that legal departments have to become as involved with legal technology that uses AI as their business counterparts have become in other industries," Lamb said.

The survey results would tend to bear him out. Per the report, the number of legal industry respondents currently utilizing AI in their business is at 65%—up 54% from last year's survey.

Furthermore, 92% of legal executive respondents said that emerging technologies were helping their business stay more competitive, which could go a long way towards explaining some of the drive pushing AI into the industry at large.

Lamb thinks that legal industry players not using AI could find themselves at a competitive disadvantage in terms of insights and the speed at which a given job or task can be accomplished.

AI, for example, can help detect jurisdictional trends or shave a few bodies off of a 50-person team that has manually been assigned to review boxes upon boxes of contracts.

"You get a best result and you get it much faster and more efficiently," Lamb said.

However, legal doesn't necessarily approach AI adoption the same way that other departments within an organization might.

For example, whereas 56% of businesses surveyed have increased their data scientist and technology head count and another 54% created new roles focused on emerging technologies, legal is more likely to engage the services of outside providers.

"I think the outside services like Lexis Nexis have the resources to put a greater emphasis on a legal department need and improve what they are delivering," Lamb said. "Law departments have to run in budget so if they can put that burden on an outside service they get the benefit of it."

But just because employees in the legal industry may be relying on outside providers doesn't mean that they can get away with a general lack of knowledge on AI. The RELX report showed that 71% of legal executives surveyed indicated that their company offers training in AI tech.

Still, why bother with instruction if legal farms out most of it's AI-related work to providers?

Lamb pointed out that lawyers traffic in context and interpretation.

"You don't need to write the software as a lawyer, but you need to understand the results you're getting," Lamb said.