Billing hours are approaching midnight, according to Anthropic’s top lawyer.
“I don’t think billable hours are the solution. We’ve known that for a long time,” Jeff Bleich, general counsel for the AI company, said Thursday.
Speaking at the American Bar Association’s White Collar Crime Lab in San Diego, Bleich said that thanks to artificial intelligence tools, companies no longer need to hire armies of lawyers to do lucrative but “tedious” work.
“We have a technology that eliminates the ability for people to get rich off of boring work,” Bleich said during a panel discussion with top lawyers from Google, IBM and Liberty Mutual. “That’s not what lawyers are trained to do, and that’s ultimately not what we want from lawyers.”
The much-maligned billable hour is a standard method used by law firms to bill their clients.
Lawyers track and aggregate each client’s work, often in six-minute increments, and bill clients accordingly.
While billable hours help businesses and other clients understand what they’re paying their lawyers for, “it’s also created a wedge,” Bleich said.
Under the current system, “corporate interests are at odds with customer interests,” he said. Companies want their lawyers to solve problems quickly, but law firms pay more the longer the job takes.
“Clients want their problems resolved as efficiently as possible with as little drama as possible,” says Bleich. “And the more corporate you are, the bigger the cases, the more dramatic, the more complex, the more work you have to do, the more profit you make.”
Other panelists generally agreed with Bleich’s statement.
“Value is no longer about spending time,” said Damon Hart, a top attorney at Liberty Mutual. “Value is your strategy and your results.”
Ann Robinson, general counsel for IBM, told the audience that the company is ready to work together to find more creative billing options.
“I welcome companies to come to me and say, ‘We’d love to work with you on this issue and this type of work, but we understand that the billable hour model isn’t incentive-aligned. So let’s sit down and talk about what your expectations are in terms of outcomes and how we can get there in a way that reflects your pressures and priorities,'” Robinson said.
Bleich said he still evaluates the work of outside law firms, but wants to find billable hour alternatives that work for everyone.
“We’re not going to simply starve you,” Bleich said. “On the other hand, you have to have an economic model that works, and the companies that adapt to it faster and better will leapfrog others because they will become more attractive to work with.”
Bleich’s comments come at a critical juncture for Anthropic, which filed suit against federal agencies this week after the Trump administration effectively blacklisted the company after contract negotiations with the Pentagon broke down.
WilmerHale, which represented Anthropic in the lawsuit, was one of the law firms targeted by President Trump last year with an executive order that was quickly blocked by a federal judge.
“I like firms that show their spine,” Bleich said after the panel discussion when asked about the use of law firms to push back against Trump’s executive order targeting law firms. He declined to comment on the lawsuit itself.
WilmerHale stands out in another way. Reginald Heber Smith ran a major law firm (then called Hale & Dole) in the early 20th century and is widely credited with inventing billable time.
