Lawyers may soon charge $10,000 an hour thanks to AI, says LexisNexis CEO

WTF?! Generative AI is going to have a huge impact on the way we work. There are the bad elements, such as job losses and the environmental impact, and the good ones, like making tasks less monotonous and aiding R&D endeavors. For lawyers, the technology could enable them to push their already high billing rates to an astounding $10,000 per hour within a decade, according to one CEO.

Sean Fitzpatrick, CEO of US data analytics company LexisNexis, made the prediction during a panel discussion at Legalweek (via Business Insider).

Currently, senior partners at some of the United States' highest-grossing law firms charge close to $2,100 per hour for their services.

Fitzpatrick believes that lawyers will be able to further use AI for various elements of their work, such as faster case law retrieval, summarizing arguments, drafting and analyzing documents, and profiling judges or opposing counsel. It could also automate monotonous tasks, leaving lawyers more time to focus on important aspects of cases. As such, they could charge higher rates for a better quality of service.

Here's your itemized bill

The CEO said not only could lawyers using AI feel justified in billing their clients more, but it would also cut down their working time, letting them take on additional legal matters and produce more billing.

"It doesn't take that much inflation to get to the $10,000-per-hour billable hour," Fitzpatrick said. "I think there's a realistic scenario where we could absolutely see this."

Before lawyers start planning to buy (another?) yacht, there is the elephant in the room that needs to be addressed: AI hallucinations.

In February, a judge recommended that Indiana attorney Rafael Ramirez be fined $15,000 for including case citations in three separate briefs that had been fabricated by ChatGPT. Ramirez admitted to using generative AI but said he was unaware that it could generate fictitious case citations.

This was far from the only case of its kind. In June 2023, two lawyers and their law firm were fined $5,000 by a district judge in Manhattan for citing fake legal research generated by ChatGPT. And in January, lawyers in Wyoming submitted nine cases to support an argument in a lawsuit against Walmart and Jetson Electric Bikes over a fire allegedly caused by a hoverboard. Eight of the cases had been hallucinated by OpenAI's chatbot.

Perhaps lawyers should ensure they aren't breaking the law themselves when using AI before charging clients $10,000 per hour for their expertise.

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