Hi there,
I’m often met with an eye roll when I talk about eliminating the billable hour from the legal industry. 🙄
“Jim — We’ve been talking about getting rid of the billable hour for 20+ years. It’s not going to happen. Move on.”
But when you believe in something passionately, and the world tells you something else, then you have one of two choices.
Change your belief, or…
Work out a way to change what the world believes.
I founded PERSUIT to change what the world believed. 👊
That value in the legal industry had to be redefined by reference to lawyers delivering outcomes, not hours.
Now it’s funny to see how quickly the world has changed.
Out of nowhere, we have just seen the greatest accelerant to killing the billable hour.
ChatGPT and similar large language models.
As legal journalist Jordan Furlong put it:
“Our entire professional functionality is rooted in our expertise with knowledge and our fluency with words… And now someone has gone and invented a Knowledge and Words Machine that does all of those things, in hardly any time at all.”
The logical conclusion is that large language models will soon prepare first drafts of research, advice, contracts — the bread and butter of what lawyers do.
As the large language models learn, those first-draft contracts and advices will move closer (and closer) to final drafts.
There will be less and less traditional (i.e. billable) work for lawyers to do.
The “Knowledge and Words Machine,” as Jordan puts it, will redefine value in law.
If today ChatGPT can pass the bar exam — essays and all, even scoring in the top 10th percentile — what do you think it will be able to do in 12, 24, 36 months?? (Large language models improved their performance on the bar exam by over 30% in just the first quarter of 2023.)
Goldman Sachs estimates that 44% of work currently performed in legal will soon be automated by AI (right behind office and admin support at 46% 🤔 ).
Ouch.
And how will this impact BigLaw?
The billable hour gave birth to and nourished BigLaw to make it what it is today.
But, I’m afraid that now, thanks to large language models like ChatGPT, BigLaw has been exposed.
The emperor has been shown to have no clothes.
Although PERSUIT originally set out to kill the billable hour, it now looks like Chat-GPT has beaten PERSUIT to the punch!
Now BigLaw will need to fundamentally rethink their business model, and build the organisational muscle to show the tangible outcomes and value of their work.
But not all will. In fact, perhaps very few will.
Like the 90% of lawyers surveyed by LexisNexis who don’t think AI will have a “transformative impact” on law practice.
And the 60% who have no plans to use AI tools right now.
The rest will be left… well, exposed.
So lawyers…
Someone just moved your cheese. What ya gonna do?
Cheers,
