Why smart firms are rethinking the billable hour using new AI tools
Summary
The legal world has debated the demise of the billable hour for years, with generative artificial intelligence merely the latest rationale offered for its extinction. Hodkinson, an attorney in corporate law before he joined London-based Definely in 2020, spoke about how lawyers consider the value of legal work, why a “self-serve” model is becoming attractive for both in-house teams and their outside firms and how new tools will filter through the profession in coming years. Let’s say on an employment contract, I wanted to get my law firm to do a double check of it, but every single time, they charge me for two hours, and it’s exorbitantly expensive, and they’re going to come back with the same two points. The smart way to do it is to understand that we can’t compete here, but at least we can start operating subscription services to help with those tasks, take it off people’s plate and capture the same amount of margin by being clever about how we do it. Or the smart thing to do is, we create more of a mechanism whereby people can come in using large language models that are fine tuned around our proprietary data to be able to self-serve on a lot of these low-value tasks.