ANZ firms set eyes on profit potential, and it's closer than it looks

92% of ANZ legal professionals believe their firm has real room to become more profitable. Most of them can also tell you exactly why they haven't captured it yet.

That's the real story in LEAP's new Profitability in Law: Australia & New Zealand Insights 2026 report. It looks at profitability through four lenses: strategy, people, technology and AI. In every one of them, the same pattern turns up. Firms know what to action, and closing the gap is well within reach. What's often missing is simply the time, trust and resourcing to act on it.

These findings are drawn from 219 ANZ respondents, part of a global study of 700 legal professionals across six markets, surveyed between 10 and 28 November 2025.

Disclaimer: The information provided in this document is of a general nature and should not be construed as specific advice or relied upon in lieu of appropriate professional advice. Whilst LEAP Legal Software uses commercially reasonably efforts to ensure the information in documents are up to date at the time of publication, LEAP does not warrant their accuracy, currency or completeness and excludes all loss or damage howsoever arising (including through negligence) in connection with the information contained in these documents.

Admin is quietly costing more than headcount

Manual admin is the single biggest cost barrier for 54% of ANZ firms, the highest rate of any region, and most respondents spend one to two hours a day on it. In Australia specifically, that figure climbs to 66%, the highest proportion globally. At typical billing rates of $300 to $800 an hour, two hours a day can add up to somewhere between $150,000 and $400,000 in lost billable capacity per fee earner, every year.

That cost rarely shows up as a single line item. It shows up as the client call that got pushed because someone was re-entering data across three systems, or the evening spent catching up on billing because the day disappeared into admin instead. Multiply that across a 10-lawyer firm and it stops being an individual annoyance. It becomes a margin problem, sitting quietly on the books whether anyone is tracking it or not.

While flexibility is a genuine strength, pay and contingency planning falls short

Admin isn't the only place that resourcing gap hides. Firm principals already know what would help retain good people: competitive salaries rank as ANZ's single biggest profitability priority. The harder part is the trade-off against margin, which is why only 35% of firms have been able to fund it so far.

Flexible work arrangements are the exception. Adoption there sits at 55%, the highest of any region surveyed, a genuine strength in this market. It just isn't a substitute for pay.

That same underinvestment shows up on the way out the door, too. Only 5% of ANZ firms say they fully document their processes when someone leaves, the largest documentation gap of any region surveyed. When an experienced practitioner exits, the firm doesn't just lose a person; it loses years of refined workflows and client context that were never written down anywhere else, and the next person starts from zero.

Automation a priority, but adoption proves challenging

The same pattern holds in technology. 46% of ANZ legal professionals rank workflow automation as their top tech investment and 32% want to consolidate onto one platform, but adoption sits at only 26% and 30% respectively. Firms have made the case to themselves. They just haven't rolled it out yet.

Australia lagging other regions for AI use

Nowhere is that belief-and-action gap more visible than in AI. Three of the top four profitability priorities named by ANZ respondents are AI use cases: document review, drafting, and legal research. Yet 56% of the region isn't using AI regularly, and adoption in Australia is the lowest of any region surveyed.

The reason isn't that lawyers fail to see the value. It's trust. 26% of ANZ respondents report low or no trust in legal tech providers for responsible AI, also the lowest of any region. That isn't reluctance to innovate so much as the same professional standard lawyers apply to everything else, extended to a new category of tool. A fabricated citation doesn't become acceptable because it was generated in seconds.

None of this will surprise anyone running a firm day to day. What the full report adds is the scale of it across all four areas, country-by-country breakdowns for Australia and New Zealand, and a clearer view of where the fastest, least disruptive wins sit.

Download the full report to see exactly where those wins are for your firm, and how your margins stack up against the rest of the region.