The annual survey on law school alumni incorporated questions on AI use for the first time this year
A survey of more than 400 recent law school graduates found that 54 percent use artificial intelligence tools as an essential part of their daily work or regularly for specific tasks, while 16 percent say they do not use AI in their current positions at all.
Conducted by the National Association for Law Placement and the NALP Foundation, the survey found that another 30 percent of respondents have access to AI tools but rarely use them.
These results come from the organizations’ annual look at recent law school alumni’s employment and satisfaction. Between November 2025 and January 2026, NALP and the NALP Foundation polled 409 lawyers who graduated from 14 Canadian law schools in 2022. The survey results – which examine graduates’ employment status, compensation, career trajectories, law school engagement after graduation, and more – were published Thursday.
Fiona Trevelyan, president and chief executive officer of the NALP Foundation, told Canadian Lawyer this is the first time the annual survey has asked respondents about their AI use.
“With the increasing prevalence of AI in the legal profession, we concluded it was important to survey these recent grads both about how they are currently using AI in their practice, and how they were prepared about AI during law school (the latter query will be useful benchmarking as we go forward),” Trevelyan said.
Of those respondents who use AI in their law firm positions, 54 percent said they used the technology for legal research, while 57 percent reported using it to compile and synthesize information. Forty-one percent said they used AI to draft documents.
AI adoption was significantly lower when respondents were attending law school, likely because AI tools were less available at the time; 97 percent said they did not use AI tools during their studies.
In July, NALP and the NALP Foundation released a separate study on US lawyers who graduated in 2022. Comparing figures from the two studies, the organizations found that Canadian graduates reported using AI tools “frequently” or “occasionally” in their current roles at higher rates (54 percent) than their American counterparts (48 percent).
Other differences emerged between the Canadian and American cohorts as well. More US graduates (51 percent) reported being “extremely satisfied” in their current roles compared to Canadian graduates (39 percent).
However, Trevelyan noted that Canadian graduates “showed slightly more stability than their US counterparts”: 53 percent of Canadian graduates surveyed said they had held two or more positions since graduation, compared with 63 percent of American graduates.
