Extract from Greg Andrews’s article “Meta Legal Ops Chief to Law Firms: It’s Time to Ditch the Billable Hour—for Your Own Good”
Meta legal ops chief Mike Haven was unequivocal this week when the moderator of his CLOC Global Institute panel on law firm pricing posed the million-dollar question: In five years, will hourly billing be the exception?
“I agree,” he told a packed room at the McCormick Place conference center in Chicago. “That has to be the case for law firms to survive.”
Haven, Meta’s global head of legal operations, joined Ilona Logvinova, chief AI officer of Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer, as panelists for a session provocatively titled, “The Great Pricing Reset: How AI Is Rewriting the Rules of Legal Value.”
Moderating was Basha Rubin, CEO of Priori Legal, a marketplace that helps legal teams find and manage outside counsel.
Rubin set the table for the discussion with a succession of slides highlighting a host of runaway trends, including a doubling of hourly rates and a tripling of Am Law 100 profits per equity partner since 2008.
