Guest article: Jason Noble, Chief of Product, ikaun
Clients now demand faster, more tailored responses. Seventy percent of corporate legal departments expect proposals to be customised and timely – a sharp increase from just 56% in 2022. And as expectations rise, so does the pressure on law firms to deliver with greater speed, accuracy, and professionalism. But our new research suggests the profession isn’t keeping up.
In the 2025 Proposal Generation and Business Development Report, we surveyed marketing, business development and proposal professionals across Am Law 100, 200, and NLJ 500 firms to understand how proposals are generated today – and what’s holding teams back. The results were clear: proposal generation, in its current state, is failing firms.
A manual process in a real-time world
Most firms still rely on workflows that are heavily – or entirely – manual. Seventy-nine percent of respondents described their proposal processes as manual or a manual-tech hybrid. Nearly half still assemble proposals using Microsoft Word, cutting and pasting from prior documents and email threads. Sixty-eight percent say they regularly bypass their firm’s official tools altogether – opting instead for off-system workarounds that often introduce risk, inconsistency and version control issues.
This isn’t a matter of individual preference. It’s a signal that current systems and structures are not fit for purpose. The average satisfaction rating with proposal technology is just five out of 10. Alignment between proposal processes and broader firm business objectives fares little better at six. These aren’t minor complaints – they reflect systemic dysfunction across the proposal lifecycle.
The consequences are significant. Professionals spend five to 20 hours per week on proposal generation, but much of that time is wasted on avoidable inefficiencies: reformatting content, searching for experience data, fixing branding, or chasing down approvals. And while these tasks may seem operational on the surface, they create strategic drag – slowing down time-to-response and compromising quality in a market that rewards both.
Proposal generation has become strategic – but the tools haven’t caught up
For decades, proposal generation was treated as a reactive support function. Attorneys brought in opportunities, and marketing or BD teams assembled decks and documents to match. That model no longer holds.
Today, proposals are how firms compete. They are the lens through which clients assess a firm’s relevance, expertise, and responsiveness. They’re not just brochures – they’re business cases. Yet the underlying infrastructure in most firms hasn’t evolved to reflect this shift.
Disconnected systems are one of the biggest pain points. More than 60% of respondents said accessing centralised, up-to-date experience data is difficult. Bios, matter summaries and prior pitches often live in separate silos, making it nearly impossible to scale personalisation without manual effort. The result is reactive, one-off proposals that take too long and look too similar.
Collaboration is also a challenge. Proposal ownership typically falls to marketing or BD, but input is needed from attorneys, finance and subject matter experts. Without integrated tools or shared workspaces, firms rely on email threads, tracked changes and phone calls to manage the process – an approach that’s slow, error-prone, and unsustainable.
Firms are ready for AI – but adoption alone won’t solve the problem
Despite the current state of affairs, firms are not resigned to the status quo. The vast majority, 84%, believe AI and automation will reshape proposal generation over the next three years. Importantly, their priorities are grounded in operational realities: 63% want improved data accuracy, 58% want faster turnaround and 53% are looking for better integration across tools.
AI is no longer viewed as experimental. It’s seen as a necessary enabler of scale. But not all AI is created equal. To deliver value, tools must be embedded in a modern, cloud-native environment that supports real-time collaboration, structured content reuse, and seamless formatting.
That’s where most firms still fall short. Legacy systems – especially those tied to desktop software – create friction at every step. They introduce formatting bugs, block collaboration and fail to provide the kind of intelligent recommendations that modern users expect. Simply layering AI on top of a broken process won’t produce results.
The most forward-looking firms are rethinking the entire proposal ecosystem. That means moving off local systems, centralising experience data and building structured workflows that can support automation. In these environments, AI doesn’t just help draft content – it curates relevant experience, applies firm branding, formats the proposal automatically and surfaces insights based on past wins and losses.
Proposal generation is the new battleground for growth
The competitive edge no longer lies solely in the strength of a firm’s experience – it lies in how well and how quickly that experience is communicated. Proposals are no longer downstream outputs. They’re strategic assets, often determining whether a firm is even invited into the room.
Firms that continue to treat proposal generation as a formatting exercise will find themselves outpaced by competitors who understand its role in business development. The shift isn’t just technical – it’s cultural. It requires firms to prioritise enablement over improvisation, strategy over scrambling.
This year’s data makes one thing clear: law firms are not struggling because they lack talent. They’re struggling because their teams don’t have the right tools or support. And as client expectations continue to rise, the opportunity cost of inaction grows steeper.
The firms that act now – modernising their infrastructure, embracing automation and rethinking how they build proposals – will be the ones who win not just more work, but better work.
Jason Noble is a recognised authority on legal technology and AI innovation. As Co-Founder and Chief Product Strategy Officer at ikaun, an AI-powered platform built to help law firms win more work, Jason leads the development of next-generation solutions that transform business development through agentic AI and centralised experience management.