--- title: "Sixteen Hours, Sixteen Seconds" description: "AI has reached almost 90 percent of lawyers in Britain and Ireland, and the billable hour is wobbling under it" author: "Jan Sokol" published: 2026-10-10T05:00:01Z modified: 2026-10-10T13:35:00Z url: https://rews.cc/a/sixteen-hours-sixteen-seconds-b226e7 language: en tags: ["ai", "law", "workforce", "automation", "economy", "business"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Sixteen Hours, Sixteen Seconds *AI has reached almost 90 percent of lawyers in Britain and Ireland, and the billable hour is wobbling under it* By Jan Sokol · October 10, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/sixteen-hours-sixteen-seconds-b226e7 ## In brief - Almost 90% of legal professionals in the U.K. and Ireland now use AI, Clio’s 2026 report found - A&O Shearman and Slaughter and May have deployed Harvey’s AI across work from loan reviews to regulatory research - Senior legal leaders expect hourly-billed work to fall from 72% to 44% within two to three years, per Deloitte - Firms must replace the repetitive tasks that trained junior lawyers, experts say; judgment will grow more valuable - 51% of legal professionals work evenings but only 32% want to; 22% work weekends against 11% who choose to The billable hour has survived recessions, regulators and clients’ revolts. It may not survive arithmetic. Artificial intelligence is now used by almost 90 percent of legal professionals in the U.K. and Ireland, [CNBC reported](https://cnbc.com/2026/10/10/ai-lawyers-billable-hour-legal-careers.html), citing legal software company Clio’s U.K. & Ireland Legal Insights Report 2026. Among firms using AI, almost 80 percent say they can handle more work without adding resources, and more than 70 percent say it has cut costs by absorbing administrative work once done by support staff. A profession that sells time watches machines take the time away. The biggest houses have already moved. A&O Shearman has worked with the legal AI company Harvey to build agents that review loan agreements and analyze regulatory filings, completing in minutes work that previously took several hours; Slaughter and May has rolled out Harvey across all its practice areas this year, including regulatory research and document analysis. ## The arithmetic of the hour Nick Rowles-Davies, founder and CEO of Lexolent, a legal finance fund based in London and Dubai, states the problem in its barest form: “You can’t charge 16 hours for something that takes 16 seconds.” The numbers are beginning to show the strain. About one in five firms that have widely adopted AI report difficulty meeting billable-hour targets, Clio found. Globally, senior legal leaders expect the share of work charged by the hour to fall from 72 percent to 44 percent over the next two to three years, according to a Deloitte survey. Mansoor Soomro, who leads the Future of Work Research Unit at Teesside University, says the billable hour is certainly not disappearing overnight — but it is getting harder to justify. Routine work stands most exposed. “If you’ve got standard documents and you’re just putting in detail, then clearly that’s an automatic process,” Rowles-Davies said. Complex work still requires human judgment, he added — in interpreting what the machine produces and in choosing the client’s strategy. And someone must catch the machine when it invents. “There have been a lot of cases where lawyers have been sanctioned for producing briefs before a court with cases that don’t exist.” ## The apprenticeship question There is a quieter casualty beneath the billing model: the way lawyers are made. The repetitive tasks now passing to software were the profession’s classroom. Reviewing hundreds of documents taught juniors what matters; writing up contracts honed their drafting; researching dozens of cases built their legal reasoning, Soomro noted. As AI takes on that work, firms will have to replace those lessons deliberately. “A faster route to a draft does not automatically mean a faster route to competence,” said Jorge Bestard, Harvey’s London-based head of EMEA. A&O Shearman says it now prizes “curiosity and entrepreneurship,” according to Francesca Bennetts, its London-based head of legal talent, and is building career paths in legal engineering, product and AI delivery that “barely existed a few years ago.” “The need to develop exceptional lawyers doesn’t go away,” she said. “They are the partners and experts of the future.” Soomro expects judgment itself to become “disproportionately valuable,” with lawyers spending more of their days checking and challenging AI output and interpreting what it means for a client. “The future may therefore not belong to the lawyer who knows the most about one narrow area, but to the lawyer who knows how to connect multiple areas to solve a complex client problem,” he said. ## What becomes of the hours Whether the freed time makes lawyers’ lives better depends on what firms choose to do with it, and here the ledger is less encouraging. Clio’s report found that 51 percent of legal professionals work evenings, but only 32 percent want to; 22 percent work weekends, against 11 percent who would choose to. Joshua Lenon, Clio’s New York-based lawyer-in-residence, believes some are already feeling the change. “Lawyers \[are\] telling us that their day is getting better,” he said. “People are really looking at these tools and saying, ‘This is making work better.’” The machine, in other words, has handed the partnership a dividend of hours. History suggests partners rarely return dividends to the staff. But the billable hour made idleness profitable and volume a virtue; a profession that bills by the second may yet discover what the second is actually worth.