AI is changing how Lawyers work – and putting the billable hour under pressure

This seems a bit exaggerated; ultimately an hour spent working is an hour spent working. If you did one task quickly, then go and do more tasks and add more value to your clients. And if have to bill for Claude Cowork tokens, then you can figure out a way to tack that onto the bill in some form ("Claude hours"?). Same model as before. This just means you can do more things for people in the same amount of time - which likely will mean that people will ask you to do "more work" (volume-wise) as before, while spending the same number of hours. It all just evens out.

This feels what parallel to today's discussions around SEO too, where people will scream that "SEO is dead" and "I can do my own SEO in 5 minutes"... yes, it is true that you can run a 2020-era SEO strategy in 5 minutes. However, a proper 2026 SEO strategy will take you just as long as 2020 SEO used to take you in 2020 because the baseline/"goal posts" for SEO have shifted.

Expect the same thing to happen to lawyers; reviewing a contract is now 15 minutes worth of work instead of 3 hours; but that means that you can review this + that + the other contract + also go through a bunch of similar cases and look for loopholes - all in the span of 1 hour. This allows you to give your client better advice in the same number hours spent. Nothing actually changes in your business model (unless you're billing token costs separately; then maybe you have some extra bonus charges; but that seems like it'd be unpopular with clients, so probably wouldn't stick)