The True Cost of Repeated Legal Work in the UK: £12.2bn Lost Every Year

As the UK continues to grapple with flatlining productivity, legal work - often overlooked in economic analysis - is emerging as a critical drag on national output. New 2025 analysis from Genie AI shows that repeated and avoidable contract work now costs UK businesses between £12.2bn and £12.6bn every year, with the burden shared almost evenly between external law firms and in-house legal teams.

These inefficiencies persist despite the availability of templates, boilerplate clauses, shared standards and increasingly powerful AI drafting tools. The result is an annual economic loss equivalent to approximately 0.47% of UK output - a silent but growing productivity issue that few organisations measure or manage.

This report sets out the scale of the problem, explains where the numbers come from, and provides a transparent methodology so journalists and analysts can validate the underlying assumptions.

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Headline Findings

Genie AI’s 2025 analysis reveals:

• £5.6 billion wasted each year in external legal fees on avoidable or repetitive contract work.
  
  
• £6.6 - £7.0 billion wasted internally by in-house legal teams repeating the same tasks.
  
  
• £12.2 - £12.6 billion total annual cost.
  
  
• Equivalent to 0.47% of UK GVA.
  
  

“These are not complex disputes or bespoke negotiations. These are simple, repeatable tasks that consume massive legal capacity across the country,” said Rafie Faruq, Co-Founder and CEO of Genie AI. “The productivity cost isn’t just borne by legal teams, it’s absorbed by the whole economy.”

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Why Repeated Legal Work Happens

Despite the mature availability of templates, boilerplate clauses and sector-specific legal standards, many UK businesses still:

• Draft contracts from scratch.
  
  
• Renegotiate identical clauses across deals.
  
  
• Pay for the same documents multiple times.
  
  

Meanwhile, in-house teams spend huge amounts of time redrafting and re-reviewing language that could be standardised.

Legal teams aren’t choosing inefficiency - they’re constrained by fragmented knowledge, no clause-reuse infrastructure, and outdated document workflows.

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A Growing Burden for Both External and Internal Legal Teams

The economic drag comes from two sources: law-firm fees and internal legal salaries.

External legal spend

Strategy& / PwC’s UK Legal Services Market Report 2025 estimates that the UK legal sector generates over £40bn in annual turnover, with corporate work forming the majority of that activity.

Using this market baseline, Genie AI calculates that around £5.6bn of external spend each year is tied to avoidable or repeated contract work - drafting and negotiation that could be automated, standardised, or reused.

In-house legal spend

Benchmarking from the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) shows that corporate legal departments now account for around 54% of total legal spend, compared to 46% spent externally.

Applying this ratio, and using the same assumptions about contract-heavy workloads, Genie AI estimates that repeated contract work consumes a further £6.6 - £7.0bn of in-house capacity every year.

Combined cost

Together, this means more than £12.2bn in legal capacity is absorbed each year by tasks that could be automated, standardised or eliminated.

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Methodology and Sources

Genie AI’s analysis uses a transparent, conservative model drawing on:

1. UK legal market size (external)

Strategy& / PwC estimate the UK legal sector generates over £40bn annually in turnover (2025 report).

2. In-house vs external spend split

The ACC show 54% of legal spend is in-house and 46% external, a ratio consistent across years.

3. Share of legal work that is contract-related

Contract creation, review and negotiation are consistently cited as the most time-consuming activity for corporate legal teams. ACC’s benchmarking shows contract management is a core responsibility for more than 90% of in-house departments.

4. Repeated / avoidable work share

Multiple independent studies show that a substantial portion of legal workflow is routine, repetitive, or administratively burdensome:

• World Commerce & Contracting (WorldCC) reports that organisations lose 8.6–9.2% of annual revenue due to inefficient contracting practices — including rework, negotiation cycles and poor contract management.
  
• EY Law’s “Reimagining the Legal Function” report found that up to 70% of in-house legal workload is spent on routine, repeatable tasks, such as standard contract review, drafting from templates, and administrative processing.
• Deloitte’s “Future Trends for Legal Services” survey similarly found that more than 50% of in-house legal workload is made up of “high-volume, routine tasks” suitable for standardisation or automation.

Taken together, these studies consistently indicate that a significant share (often the majority) of legal work is routine or repeatable.

On this basis, we have applied a deliberately conservative assumption that 40% of contract-related legal work is repeated or avoidable.

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The Broader Productivity Challenge

These numbers capture only legal time - not:

• Business stakeholder time
  
  
• Revenue delays from slow contracting
  
  
• Lost commercial opportunities
  
  
• Increased dispute risk
  
  
• Longer deal cycles
  
  

Once these are included, the true cost of repeated contract work to the UK economy likely exceeds the £12.2bn headline figure.

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A Path Forward: Standardisation and AI

Genie AI directly addresses the structural causes of repeated work:

• Standardised clause libraries across teams and industries.
  
  
• Trusted, vetted templates aligned with best practice.
  
  
• Autonomous drafting tools that prevent reinvention.
  
  
• Searchable, reusable knowledge embedded into workflows.
  
  

Rafie Faruq: “In a services-based economy like the UK’s, productivity improvements come from working smarter inside the businesses that drive GDP. We need to move legal from being a cost centre to a productivity multiplier.”

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Conclusion

Repeated contract work is not a niche operational problem - it is a national productivity issue.

Our 2025 analysis shows the cost is measurable, it’s growing, it’s avoidable and modern tooling, like Genie AI, can eliminate it.

In a year when productivity is once again front and centre of national debate, removing repeated legal work is one of the most immediate and most overlooked opportunities for improvement.

Genie AI is committed to making that future a reality.

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