THE GAP
Here is the simple math.
A matter used to take forty hours. With AI, it might take thirty or less. Your client isn't oblivious, and eventually they'll insist on paying you something in between.
Which means that to just keep your lawyer's income exactly where it was last year, they will have to win much more work.
This requires a different conversation.
Most of the AI panels I have sat in this year have been about legal delivery: which tasks get automated, how associates are affected, which vendor to choose, what the ethics opinion says. These are all fair and appropriate questions, but they are also all questions about the part of the job that is shrinking.
The question few are asking is what fills the space.
My answer includes origination, relationships, and being the person a potential client thinks of first. The part of a lawyer's job that no model has come anywhere near replacing, and the part most firms have trouble systematically teaching.
For decades, firms had a lot of great lawyers, but only a few great rainmakers, and a firm could carry a lot of the first kind. That carrying capacity is about to shrink significantly. Being an excellent technical lawyer is becoming table stakes. It was arguably always table stakes, but now there are higher stakes: the ability to build relationships, create opportunities, grow clients, and generate revenue.
The part the AI conversation leaves out
This is where the AI conversation connects with a challenge I’ve spent much of my career helping firms solve.
Let's say you accept everything above and decide, correctly in my view, that more lawyers in your firm need to become rainmakers, or at least move a good deal closer to it than they are today. So you invest in training, and it's good training.
Then your lawyers return to their desks and do what years of practice have taught them to do, which is bill hours (I wrote in my last issue about why that happens, and why it is not the lawyers' fault). What makes this moment different is that AI is about to hand those same lawyers something most of them have never had much of: time.
Here is what I’ve learned about time inside a law firm: like an open field, it will not remain untouched for long. If you do not deliberately cultivate it, weeds will grow. Time gets consumed by work that is less profitable or less enjoyable, and by random, poorly planned business development activities that create motion without meaningful progress.
The answer is not simply to “find time” for business development. It is to cultivate the field intentionally: pull the weeds, protect the space, and plant the activities most likely to produce the yield you want.
Preparing them to fill the hours
Choosing the right AI tools will matter, but every firm will have access to more or less the same ones soon enough, so what will separate them is what their lawyers do with the hours those tools hand back. That's a leadership question far more than a technology one.
It is about focusing, guiding, measuring, and tracking your lawyers toward the future that is coming. It is about preparing them to fill the hours.
Three places to start this budget season:
Focus. Decide where the freed hours should go before they arrive, which for most lawyers means a short list of specific relationships to deepen: two or three clients, a handful of referral sources, a new industry group to join, a few partners in other practice groups they barely know. "Do more business development" is very hard to act on during a busy week, whereas "Have coffee with these three people this quarter" is something a lawyer can put on the calendar today.
Guide. Most lawyers were never taught what to do with an hour set aside for business development, which is a large part of why so many of those hours quietly drift back to billable work. Someone has to show them, and then keep showing them: one small, specific step each week, with a reminder that reaches them when the plan is the last thing on their mind.
Measure and track. Last issue I wrote about measuring progress rather than success. It matters even more now, because the hours themselves are what you are trying to redirect. Tracking conversations, lunches, and follow-ups week to week will tell you whether your lawyers are strategically filling the time. Waiting for year-end origination numbers will only tell you, much too late, whether they did.
None of this asks a lawyer to become someone else. It asks the firm to point them in a clear direction, walk alongside them for a while, and keep an eye on whether they are getting there.
The hours are coming either way. The question is whether your lawyers will know how to best fill them.
FROM THE COACHING CHAIR
A partner in a mid-sized US firm once told me he was frustrated that he wasn't getting internal referrals, and he assumed it was because his partners simply didn't think of him. As we talked it through, it became clear that the real issue was that most of them didn't really know him.
So he turned the tables and scheduled thirty lunches and dinners over the next several months, with his own partners rather than with clients.
He reported that once people got to know him, the floodgates opened and he received a significant number of internal referrals.
What I love about this story is how ordinary it is: he didn't need a new skill or a new tool; he simply made a decision about where he was going to focus his time, and then he followed through. That's what filling the hours looks like.
ONE QUESTION
If AI gives each of your lawyers back even a few hours a week, where will those hours go?
And a harder one: who in your firm is responsible for making sure they go somewhere that builds a book of business?
Keep building,
David Freeman, J.D.