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Jeff Bleich of Anthropic says artificial intelligence will end the dominance of hourly billing in legal billing.
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Hourly billing means attorneys get paid more when they spend more time working.
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But Blige said AI tools eliminate “tedious” work, which reduces the overall time spent by lawyers.
According to Anthropic’s senior attorney, billing time was close to midnight.
“I don’t think hourly billing is the solution, and we’ve known that for a long time,” Jeff Bleich, the artificial intelligence company’s general counsel, said Thursday.
Speaking at the American Bar Association’s White Collar Crime Institute in San Diego, Blige said artificial intelligence tools are eliminating the need for companies to hire legions of lawyers to do lucrative but “tedious” work.
“Now we have a technology that eliminates the things that allow people to get rich from tedious work,” Blige said on the panel, which was joined by top lawyers from Google, IBM and Liberty Mutual. “That’s not what lawyers are trained to do, and it’s not what we ultimately want lawyers to do.”
The much-maligned billable time method is the standard method for law firms to bill clients.
Lawyers typically track the work completed for each client in six-minute increments, tally it, and bill the client accordingly.
While hourly billing helps companies and other clients understand what they’re paying lawyers for, it also “creates a barrier,” Blige said.
He said that under the current system, “the interests of companies are not aligned with the interests of their customers”. Companies expect lawyers to solve problems quickly, but law firms are paid more when the hours are longer.
“Customers want you to solve problems as efficiently as possible and with as little drama as possible,” says Blige. “If you’re a firm, the bigger the case, the more dramatic it becomes, the more complex it becomes, the more work that needs to be done – the more lucrative it is.”
Other panelists largely agreed with Blige’s remarks.
“The value is no longer about the time you put in,” said Damon Hart, principal attorney at Liberty Mutual. “The value is your strategy, your results.”
IBM general counsel Anne Robinson told the audience she was willing to work with them to find more creative billing methods.
“I’m open to companies coming in and saying, ‘I really want to work with you on this or this type of work, and I know the hourly bill model is not a consistent incentive, so let’s sit down and talk about your expectations for outcomes and how we can achieve that in a way that reflects your pressures and priorities,'” Robinson said.
