"We looked at fixed fees," the practice head told me, in the tone people use for a holiday they nearly booked. The working group's paper is still on the shared drive; the firm still writes off the overruns it daren't pass on. The arguments for alternative fees were never the problem — the pressure was. AI has made the gap between time spent and value delivered impossible to keep out of sight. The alternatives work. The open question is whether a firm has the discipline to run
T3PS Legal Dynamics · Series 1: The Billable Hour Under Siege · Refreshed June 2026 There is a moment in every transformational technology adoption when the organisation deploying the tool suddenly realises that the tool works against the way it gets paid. The legal profession has reached that moment. Quietly, uncomfortably, and with considerable reluctance, law firms across the UK and beyond are grappling with what I have come to call the AI efficiency paradox: the better yo