Worth Reading – AI Not Only Failed To Kill The Billable Hour, It’s Looking Like Its Bodyguard
This is an interesting thing to consider:
If AI does what its most enthusiastic supporters swear it does, it compresses time spent on the matter and allows firms to cut back on expenses — and if the firm is able to do both of those things, it provides reliable baseline pricing data. Practice areas are all not created equal, but the promise of AI included smoothing out costly unpredictabilities.
Instead, AI is kicking up work lawyers didn’t have the luxury of pursuing before. Having a tireless idea generator just makes the scope of every engagement bigger.
As someone who has heard people talk about spending 30-45 minutes with AI crafting an email response, I think this might apply outside law firms. I think using AI may be paralyzing us. There’s always another tweak, a different way to say something, another item we hadn’t thought of and need to discuss with our agent.
We’ve turned basic communication into committee work and, in the process, turned a tool designed to save us time into one that makes everything take longer.
Thus, when you bill by the hour, you don’t mind that so much. For those of us just trying to get things done, it’s exhausting.
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