The Brief:
MinterEllison’s Kate Booth says moving away from the billable hour could protect junior lawyers’ core skills.
Meanwhile, UNSW’s Michael Legg warns lawyers who can’t write or research will be “displaced” by AI.
The fight over the billable hour has mostly been framed as a question of clients and margins. MinterEllison’s head of capability Kate Booth says it’s just as much about how juniors learn.
Last month, we looked at how firm leaders are thinking about pricing in the AI era. A LexisNexis survey found 55% of UK legal professionals now expect AI to change how firms bill, and Ashurst Perkins Coie and Mallesons leaders conceded that nobody has cracked the formula yet.
Most of that conversation has centred on what clients are willing to pay for. Speaking at the NSW Supreme Court on Tuesday, Booth pointed to something the hourly rate has quietly been covering all along: junior training.
We have always effectively factored that into our rates. There are lower hourly rates for juniors, who may take a longer time to do a task than a senior to do, in recognition that the junior was learning while doing.
But clients are now pushing firms to hand the grunt work, like chronologies and document summaries, over to AI. Those are the same tasks juniors have traditionally been trained on.
Booth said the apprenticeship model isn’t “dead or broken”, but it is under “great strain”, and she sees value-based pricing as a way to ease it.
“Freeing up this focus on the minute or the six-minute unit may well deliver better outcomes for our early career lawyers.”
Under time-based billing, every minute a junior spends learning lands on the client’s bill. Pricing on value could ease that pressure, giving juniors room to keep doing the work they learn from.
UNSW Professor Michael Legg explained why those skills matter. Lawyers who lose them, he said, will be “displaced”, because if juniors can’t write, they can’t check whether AI’s work is any good.
“If you can’t write, how do you determine the AI output is appropriate?” Legg said.
The same goes for research.
“If generative AI is used for research and writing...the lawyer becomes the spectator rather than the participant,” he said.
So as firms work out what replaces the six-minute unit, the question is not just what clients will pay for, but whether juniors still get the reps. Legg said lawyers need to be trained to think “with, without and about” AI.
“The human must be in control. To be in control, they need to retain some of those old or traditional skills.”
Source: Lawyerly