Worth Reading – AI Is Killing The Billable Hour (And It’s About Time)
I would agree that it’s about time the billable hour died, but I think what we’re going to see is a struggle to figure out what comes next.
As someone who helped build an artificial intelligence platform that can do a day’s worth of legal research in seconds, I’m a bit biased. I firmly believe in the transformative power of technology to enhance the delivery of legal services. But this isn’t just tech evangelism – it’s also about better business. The billable hour made sense when lawyers had to grind through mountains of paper and pace the law library floors. In an era of GPT-4, Watson, Caseway, and Harvey, that model is rapidly losing its rationale. Why measure legal work by the hour when hours no longer correlate to value? It’s time we measure success by results and expertise, not by clocked time.
https://alistairvigier.com/f/ai-is-killing-the-billable-hour-and-it%E2%80%99s-about-time
Let me state the obvious here about Alistair’s quote. He’s more than a “bit” biased. 😉
But, I digress. He is correct to point out that you won’t get away with charging clients for hours of research when decent AI tools can significantly reduce that time. The question I have that he does not answer is about defining the value.
How do we value the output of that AI research? How good is it, and how much did the lawyer rely on their expertise to check the work of the AI tool? In my opinion, either the AI research is so good that I barely need a lawyer to review it, or it’s so questionable that I need a lawyer to spend a significant amount of time correcting it.
In the former case, is that enough of a market to remain profitable as a law firm?
In the latter, is the AI adding value or simply changing what tasks the lawyer spends their hours on?
I don’t think we have a settled answer on this. As I’m not someone who conducts legal research, I’m unable to comment on the quality of the research. In the areas where I do have expertise, what I’ve seen from AI is pretty mediocre. In some situations, that’s acceptable. In others, and that includes many of you who post on social media, it’s making you look bad. It’s boring. It’s bland and does nothing to differentiate you from other brands lazily creating content with AI.
For lawyers and other professionals, billing hours is indeed a dumb approach. It hasn’t made sense in years. If AI finally pushes that out of our way, we’ll owe it thanks for that alone. I don’t think AI is good enough to do work on its own, though, so the question then becomes, what are we billing for? Where’s the work? Do you have solid baselines for how much value AI brings versus how much a human is having to contribute to make up for times when the AI falls short, and who decides that?
We’re not there yet. I fear we will have to live with billable hours for a little longer.
Follow these topics: Artificial Intelligence, LawFirms
