Overwhelming majority of Americans trust AI to find their law firm, new report says
Artificial intelligence is changing how consumers find and hire lawyers, according to a recent report from LLM Listed.
In the AI Legal Consumer Report 2026, 96% of nearly 900 respondents said they trust AI platforms to recommend a good law firm. At the same time, 84% said they wouldn’t trust a firm that did not appear in AI results.
“That is pretty shocking,” says Ben Harper, the founder of LLM Listed, an AI-focused marketing technology company that helps legal organizations improve their visibility across AI platforms. “If you have billboards all over town but you didn’t appear in those AI results, according to this, people are not using that firm. This is obviously based on one set of people, but still, it’s a big number.”
When it comes to their hiring decisions, consumers are using AI to speed up the process, according to the report. Seventy-five percent of respondents said AI reduced the time that they spent on selecting a lawyer, while 74% used AI to vet a firm before making their final decision. Respondents also reported considering an average of only 2.3 firms before making their decision.
“This shows that people are very much, if not exclusively, using AI as part of their decision-making process and in quite large numbers,” Harper says.
Among other findings, the AI Legal Consumer Report 2026 shows that AI could create more opportunities for small and midsize firms. Seventy-three percent of respondents said they would contact a firm that they had never heard of if it was recommended by AI.
Faced with this information, firms have to get a better sense of how they appear in AI search results, Harper says. He notes that they can do it themselves by asking platforms questions about their brand, or they can conduct a visibility audit.
“If they’re not already, they need to start thinking about it pretty seriously in the same way that they would have done their Google search visibility 10 or 15 years ago,” he says.
LLM Listed’s report includes responses from 871 Americans who used legal services in the past six months or were planning to hire a lawyer.
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