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Artificial intelligence is now used by almost 90% of legal professionals in the UK and Ireland, bringing scrutiny to one of the profession’s oldest practices: billable time.
This is according to legal software company Clio’s UK and Ireland Legal Insights Report 2026, which found that almost 80% of businesses using AI say they can handle more work without increasing resources, and more than 70% say they can reduce costs by absorbing administrative tasks previously performed by support staff.
As a result, AI is challenging some of the assumptions on which the legal profession was built, forcing companies to reevaluate how lawyers spend their time, how they charge fees, and how new lawyers learn the ropes.
You can’t charge something that takes 16 seconds for 16 hours.
Nick Rowles-Davies
Rexorent
Some of the UK’s biggest companies are already doing this. A&O Sherman is working with legal AI firm Harvey to develop an artificial intelligence agent for tasks such as reviewing loan agreements and analyzing regulatory filings, which it says can complete tasks that previously took hours in minutes. Slaughter & May, meanwhile, deployed Harvey across all areas of its business this year, including regulatory research and document analysis.
Billable hour pressure
Billable hours are central to many law firms’ business models, but the economics are no longer so simple as AI significantly reduces the amount of time lawyers spend reviewing and preparing documents.
“You can’t bill 16 hours for something that takes 16 seconds,” Nick Rowles-Davies, founder and chief executive of Rexorent, a legal finance fund based in London and Dubai, told CNBC.
According to a report from Clio, approximately one in five companies that have broadly implemented AI report difficulty meeting billable hour goals. According to a Deloitte study, senior legal leaders around the world expect their hourly work load to decline from 72% to 44% over the next two to three years.
Rawls-Davis said routine work is most at risk. “If you have a standard document and you just enter the details, it’s obviously an automated process.”
However, he added that complex legal work still requires human judgment, especially when it comes to interpreting AI output and determining the appropriate strategy for a client.
Lawyers say days are getting better
Lawyers also need the ability to discern AI hallucinations. “There are many examples of lawyers being sanctioned for preparing court briefs for cases that don’t exist,” Rawls-Davis said.
Mansour Sumro, head of the Future of Work research unit at Teesside University in Middlesbrough, UK, told CNBC that while billable hours certainly won’t disappear overnight, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to justify them.
Young lawyer training
Smuro added that the way lawyers learn their jobs is also changing, as repetitive tasks have traditionally helped young lawyers learn the building blocks of law. He added that he was able to learn what was important by reviewing hundreds of documents, hone his drafting skills by writing contracts, and develop his legal reasoning by researching dozens of cases.
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Jorge Bestard, head of EMEA at London-based Harvey, says companies need to carefully replace these learning opportunities as AI takes over more of the work. “A faster route to the draft doesn’t automatically mean a faster route to ability,” he told CNBC.
A&O Sherman is more about “curiosity and entrepreneurship,” said Francesca Bennett, the London-based firm’s head of legal talent. It’s also building career paths in legal engineering, products and AI delivery that “almost didn’t exist a few years ago,” she told CNBC.
“It doesn’t eliminate the need to develop great lawyers,” Bennett said. “They are our future partners and experts.”
Smuro predicts that judgments will be “disproportionately valuable” in this area, as lawyers spend more time checking and challenging AI output and interpreting what it means for their clients.
“Thus, the future may not belong to lawyers who know best in one narrow area, but to lawyers who know how to connect multiple areas to solve complex client problems,” he said.
AI and workloads
Whether AI efficiencies ultimately improve lawyers’ work lives may depend on how they use the time they have. According to Clio’s report, 51% of legal professionals work nights, but only 32% want to work, 22% work weekends and 11% want to work. Joshua Lennon, Clio’s New York-based resident attorney, believes some lawyers are already seeing the benefits.
As AI becomes more widespread, “lawyers are saying it’s getting better every day,” Lennon told CNBC. “People are really looking at these tools and saying, ‘This is going to make my job better.'”
