Tech giant’s top lawyer makes bold predicition
The billable hour, that most stubborn fixture of the legal profession, may finally have met its match, according to the general counsel of US tech giant Anthropic.
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. Bleich, who previously served as a partner and group CEO at Dentons before joining Anthropic, said AI tools are eliminating the need for companies to hire armies of lawyers to do what he called “tedious” but lucrative work.
“Now we’ve got a technology that’s going to eliminate the sorts of things that allow people to become wealthy off of tedious work,” Bleich said on the panel, alongside lawyers at Google, IBM, and Liberty Mutual. “That was not what lawyers are trained to do, and not what we ultimately look to lawyers for.”
According to Bleich, the current model pits the interests of firms against those of their clients. Whilst the longer lawyers work on a matter, the more money they make, clients naturally want matters resolved as quickly as possible. The billable hour has “created a wedge,” he said.
“Clients want you to solve the problem as efficiently as possible and with as little drama as possible,” he continued. “And if you’re a company, the bigger the case gets, and the more dramatic it gets, and the more complicated it gets, and the more work that has to be done, the more lucrative it is.”
As reported by Business Insider, fellow panellist Damon Hart, lawyer at Liberty Mutual, added that the value of legal work is no longer about time spent. “The value is no longer you putting in time,” Hart said. “The value is your strategy, your results.”
Bleich said he still values outside law firms, but wants them to find an alternative that works for everyone. “We’re not going to sort of cheap out and starve you,” he said. “On the other hand, you have to have an economic model that works. And the firms that adapt to that faster and better will be leapfrogging other firms, because they’ll be more attractive to work with.”
These comments come at a difficult time for Anthropic, who are currently embroiled in a dispute with the Trump administration after the US Department of Defence effectively blacklisted the company following the collapse of contract negotiations. Anthropic has since sued the federal agencies involved.