IRVINE, CA –July 14, 2026 — ikaun, the industry's most advanced AI-powered proposal generation platform, today released The State of Winning Work in Law Firms: A 2026 Benchmark Report. Drawing on a focused group of senior marketing, business development, and proposal leaders at firms across the Am Law 100, Am Law 200, and NLJ 500, the report documents a profession competing harder than ever for new business with tools built for a slower-paced era. To request a complimentary copy of the report, go here.
The central finding is a widening gap: proposal demand is climbing fast while the data and processes proposals depend on are not keeping pace. 69% of firms say proposal volume rose over the past year and not a single respondent reported a decline.That volume is landing on small teams working tight clocks, increasingly forced to triage which opportunities they can realistically pursue — to respond to at least some RFPs.
But the report's most important finding sits beneath the volume problem: of the 76% of firms that reported not pursuing work, 30% reported the reason as lack of time or resources.
When asked which stage of proposal creation consumes the most time, respondents ranked finding experience and matter data first — ahead of writing, tailoring, or formatting. Only 7% say it is “very easy” to find relevant experience for a proposal, and 74% have no single, current source of truth for matter experience. The bottleneck isn't writing the proposal; it's assembling the raw material the proposal is built from.
“Proposal teams aren't short on ambition or opportunity — they're short on trust worthy, findable experience data,” said Mark Bilson, Chief Revenue Officer for ikaun. “Firms are being asked to win more work on shorter timelines, and lower-value matters are increasingly arriving as formal RFPs. When the experience that proves what a firm can do is scattered across disconnected systems, every pursuit becomes a hunting expedition. Fix the data layer, and rising proposal volume stops being strain on business development capacity and becomes a pipeline of opportunity.”
The research also reframes the role of AI in legal proposals. Only 27% of firms are actively using AI in proposals today, and where it is in use, it is concentrated on drafting and rewriting — not on the experience-retrieval problem firms identify as their deepest pain. Adoption is gated by trust, not enthusiasm: the qualities firms weigh most are accuracy, ease of adoption, security, and integration. The report's conclusion is direct — before AI can reliably help win a proposal, firms need a centralized, current, searchable record of who they are and what they have done.
Additional findings include:
• The process is still overwhelmingly manual. Over 50% are still creating proposals in Microsoft Word.”
• Data lives everywhere — which means nowhere reliable. Experience data is split across excel, Word documents, directories, CRM, and spreadsheets, with a third of firms reporting it is not centralized at all.
• The friction is a data problem in disguise. The top sources of cross-team friction — cross-office coordination and data ownership —both trace back to the absence of a single source of truth.
• Firms are buying outcomes, not features. Asked what would justify a new investment, respondents prioritized reduced manual work (60%), better win rates (48%), and better data accuracy (44%).
About ikaun
ikaun is the industry's most advanced AI-powered proposal generation platform, built to help law and AEC firms win more work. Combining intelligent proposal generation, AI co-authoring, and centralized experience management, ikaun equips marketing and business development teams to produce higher-quality proposals and pitches faster, more accurately, and with less manual effort. Unlike horizontal RFP tools, ikaun is purpose-built for firms where complexity, compliance, and credentialing matter, and is delivered as a fully managed, white-glove solution tailored to each firm's operating model. Learn more at www.ikaun.com.
Media Contact:
Trish Nagy
Marketing Director, ikaun
patricia.nagy@ikaun.com
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