The CEO of Lexisnexis predicts that AI could increase lawyers at $ 10,000 per hour

Lawyers’ firms determine how to use artificial intelligence to save time, but their lawyers twist their hands on their billable hours.

Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of Lexisnexis North America, United Kingdom and Ireland, thinks a lot about this question. He oversees the teams responsible for providing data products and information to law enforcement professionals, companies and government entities. Last week, during a round table at Legalweek, he tried to relieve their concerns.

Fitzpatrick predicted that certain legal partners could charge a standard billing rate of $ 10,000 an hour during the decade, placing them on the upper set of well -remunerated white collars.

Bringing rates are up in large companies across the country, driven by continuous consolidation of law firms and the growing demand for legal talent. The rate in force for the higher partners of some of the country’s most profitable law firms is close to $ 2,100 an hour, according to an analysis of public disclosure of the Valeo Partners legal data platform.

Fitzpatrick’s conviction is that lawyers who take advantage of artificial intelligence, from virtual legal assistants to chatbots, will provide better quality service to customers. They could then charge more.

During his round table, Fitzpatrick offered a hypothetical.

“Let’s say that a lawyer does 10 hours of work at $ 750 an hour, and let’s just say that it is a very simple question. It is the only person who works there,” he said.

She invoices at the client $ 7,500.

“Let’s say that tomorrow, she has almost exactly the same question, but tomorrow, she has access to this new technology that helps her with her work. It offers her additional perspectives and things that she had not thought before. It is an additional set of eyes.”

“She is in fact able to create more value for her client,” he continued. “So yesterday, she billed $ 7,500. Now she has a better work product than before. Maybe she can charge $ 8,000.”

The work is also taking less time now. It is free to take additional legal issues and produce more invoices.

For the best senior partners, “you don’t need a lot of inflation to reach the bill of $ 10,000 per hour,” said Fitzpatrick. “I think there is a realistic scenario where we could absolutely see this.”

Earlier this year, Lexisnexis has deployed protected, a system that uses agents – software that can do tasks without much human hand maintenance – to write drafts, create deadlines from documents and allow users to question all their business data. It was built on a patchwork of large -scale and refined models of Openai, Anthropic, Mistral, AWS and Microsoft, said the company.

The dependence of the legal industry at biller is faced with a potential disturbance. Legal experts, including lawyers and founders of legal technology startups, shared with Business Insider at Legalweek that law firms go to fixed costs instead of billable hours. The idea is that artificial intelligence can manage simpler legal tasks, releasing lawyers to apply more brain to problem solving.

These lawyers could lose some of the billable hours they transmit to customers. But the value of their time is likely to increase – a belief shared by Max Junestrand, founder and director general of Legora, one of the most buzzing software companies making legal co -pilots.

He told Business Insider that customers would press their law firms on how they take advantage of artificial intelligence to “do more with the hours they have”. Lawyers’ firms will apply fixed costs for bread and butter questions because “both (both (AI) increases the adoption and the sophistication of tools continues to improve”.

“Lawyers’ customers still want cheaper and better quality services,” said Junestrand. “The work that AI cannot do today will become even more precious. Lawyers will therefore have greater opportunity.”

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