As AI-automation seeps its way into the normalcy of life, it continues to take over certain aspect of careers like customer service to save time and reduce human interaction. Lawyers, alike are concerned about the consequence on their billable hours. Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of LexisNexis North America, UK, and Ireland, at a panel discussion at LegalWeek predicted some law partners may charge a standard billing rate of $10,000 per hour within the next decade, positioning them among the highest-paid professionals in white-collar fields.
While this may come at a surprise but the reducing digital divide and increasing accessibility to AI-based tools has made services like legal advice costlier by the hour. The average cost a senior partners charges at some of the highest-grossing law firms is close to $2,100 an hour according to a Valeo Partners analysis report. In fact, as per Fitzpatrick’s claims, the integration of AI will lead to improved quality of services with advanced legal chatbots for instance.
The opportunity cost that increases for the client as well as the service provider also levels out when the legal matter gets another set of eyes to review the facets of the case. Increasing efficiency and broadening the horizons, it eventually enhances the value of the legal professional, justifying the $10,000 billing hour.
AI Integration in Law Firms
LexisNexis introduced Protégé, a system utilizing autonomous software agents to draft documents, generate timelines from records, and enable users to query enterprise data with minimal human oversight. According to the company, it integrates large-scale and fine-tuned models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, AWS, and Microsoft. However, legal experts, attorneys and legal-tech startup founders, shared with Business Insider at Legalweek that law firms are moving toward fixed fees instead of billable hours. The principle behind the decision is that artificial intelligence can takeover the repetitive tasks and the experts can allocate majority of the time for problem-solving.