Jeff Bleich, the top lawyer at Claude-maker Anthropic, told last week’s American Bar Association White Collar Crime Institute in San Diego: “I don’t think the billable hour is the solution, and we’ve known it for a long time.”
For the uninitiated the dreaded billable hour has long been the backbone of how law firms charge clients. Rather than charging a fixed fee, lawyers instead split their time into six-minute increments, log their work, and invoice their clients accordingly.
The model has been under pressure for some time, with clients increasingly pushing back against open-ended hourly charges in favour of more predictable fee structures.
