AI Today: Lawyers are using AI. Clients are still paying by the hour.
More than half of lawyers in one Australian state now use AI at work. Only about a quarter say it has cut what clients pay.
Ask a lawyer in Victoria, Australia, whether they use AI at work and, this year, more than half will say yes. Ask whether it has made their clients' bills smaller, and only about one in four will.
AI Today is a series from Fíor, a natural language classifier that predicts whether a piece of text was more likely written by a person or by AI. Each piece explains one development in AI and shows where the claims come from.
The figures come from the Victorian Lawyer Census, an annual survey run by the state's legal regulator. The Guardian reported that this year's census, of 2,221 lawyers, found 55% now use AI in their work, up from 37% a year earlier. Most use general tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Copilot rather than software built for lawyers. Only 26% said AI had led to lower fees for clients.
When the regulator published last year's figures in May, its chief executive, Fiona McLeay, said lawyers saw AI mainly as a way to improve their own workflows, and that its potential to improve client services remained largely untapped. A year on, adoption has jumped. The fees have mostly not followed.
Who keeps the time?
The reason is not hard to find. Much of the legal profession still charges by the hour. If AI cuts a six-hour task to two, a firm billing by the hour earns less unless it raises its rates, finds more work or keeps the saving for itself. Lower prices are only one of the options, and not the most natural one under that model.
Georgie Rychner, one of the researchers behind the census, said the efficiency gains were smaller than might have been expected. The research suggests larger business clients are best placed to push for lower prices, because they buy enough legal work to notice when it gets faster.
There is also a twist. Lawyers reported that clients using AI themselves can create extra work, arriving with inaccurate information or AI-drafted documents that need correcting. The time AI saves on one side of the desk can be spent fixing it on the other.
A different model
Some newer firms are built differently. Reuters reported on lawyers leaving large firms for AI-focused ones that price by project, fixed fee or outcome instead of the hour. Leon Johnson, who left Goodwin Procter to lead one of them, OmniLex Partners, said better AI could undo the traditional model, in which junior lawyers do the first pass on a matter before it climbs through layers of review.
The technology companies are moving in too. Reuters reported this week that Anthropic has added more Claude tools for lawyers, alongside work from Google, Microsoft and Thomson Reuters.
None of it removes the need to check. Damien Charlotin, a legal scholar who tracks AI errors in court filings, told Reuters that newer models appear to be improving, but that made-up citations are unlikely to disappear any time soon. He warned that better AI carries its own risk: people checking its work less carefully.
Every hour a lawyer spends checking AI's work is an hour that still gets billed. Until the way law is priced changes, the time AI saves will mostly stay with whoever does the billing.
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