Jobs / Legal
Can agents do legal work?
Legal research, drafting, review, and support.
- US jobs
- 1,305,620 (0.8% of employment)
- Typical wage
- $121K a year (employment-weighted mean of occupation medians)
- Occupations
- 8 in O*NET 31.0
- Evidence
- 3 benchmarks from 5 institutions
Task level
Unexplored
No task-level benchmark in our collection tests legal work, such as contract review or legal research with tools.
No benchmark covers this work yet.
Project level
Partial
Only adjacent evidence. APEX-Agents includes corporate-law tasks: across banking, consulting, and law, the best agent passes 73.5% on the first try. GDPval includes lawyers among its 44 occupations. Neither benchmark tests work with real clients, courts, or deadlines.
Evidence: APEX-Agents, GDPval, GDPval-AA — by Artificial Analysis, Box, Harvey, Mercor, and OpenAI. Reading dated 23 Sep 2026.
Agents succeed on some scoped tasks. Reliable or end-to-end work is not shown.
Benchmarks for this work
Also relevant
These benchmarks cover part of this family's work.
- 1846 EloClaude Opus 5.5 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort, Default Fallback) · 23 Sep 2026Unrated
Functions: Financial analysisConsulting workLegal workProfessional deliverables
What we do not know
- Benchmarks measure tasks, not whole jobs. A job is a bundle of tasks, judgment, and relationships.
- Capability is not adoption. A task that agents can do in a benchmark may still be done by people at work.
- Most results come from single runs. Reliability over many runs is often unknown.
Occupations in this family
Sorted by US employment (BLS OEWS May 2025). O*NET sub-occupations share the employment figure of their SOC group.
| Occupation | SOC | US jobs |
|---|---|---|
| Lawyers | 23-1011.00 | 755K |
| Paralegals and Legal Assistants | 23-2011.00 | 393K |
| Title Examiners, Abstractors, and Searchers | 23-2093.00 | 49K |
| Legal Support Workers, All Other | 23-2099.00 | 47K |
| Judges, Magistrate Judges, and Magistrates | 23-1023.00 | 24K |
| Administrative Law Judges, Adjudicators, and Hearing Officers | 23-1021.00 | 16K |
| Judicial Law Clerks | 23-1012.00 | 13K |
| Arbitrators, Mediators, and Conciliators | 23-1022.00 | 9K |
How to cite
Credit the original work first: the benchmarks listed on this page, and their institutions.
Then, if you used this page:
Can Agents Work. "Can agents do legal work?." https://canagentswork.com/jobs/legal/ (accessed 2026-09-24). CC BY 4.0.@misc{caw-jobs-legal,
title = {{Can agents do legal work?}},
author = {{Can Agents Work}},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://canagentswork.com/jobs/legal/}},
note = {Accessed 2026-09-24. CC BY 4.0}
}