The long-predicted death of the billable hour may finally be here—and this time, it’s armed with a scythe. In a sweeping critique of time-based billing, Ian McDougall, president of the LexisNexis Rule of Law Foundation, argues in this week's NLJ that artificial intelligence has made hourly charging ‘intellectually, commercially and ethically indefensible’
McDougall says AI doesn’t merely speed up legal work; it destroys the fiction that time equals value. Tasks that once took hours can now be done in minutes, making billing by endurance ‘absurd’ and potentially perverse.
The shift, he suggests, could also loosen one of law’s most stubborn gender choke points, replacing presenteeism with judgement, risk management and leadership.
Sceptics have ‘heard this before’, McDougall concedes, but this time lawyers aren’t being asked to change their incentives—they’re being overtaken. Once clients experience faster, cheaper, high-quality output, ‘the clock cannot be turned back’.
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