Enrico Schaefer, an attorney who has used AI for three years, argues that hourly billing is dead. Lawyers need to stop counting hours and start measuring the value they deliver per task using AI tools. He promises concrete workflows in longer videos.
Chapters
A big challenge for me is I practice law all day. So I'm using these AI tools, I'm all in, I understand how to use them because I've been a power user for over 3 years. I teach other attorneys how to use these tools effectively, and I teach law firms how to implement AI across the organization. But one of the big challenges I have is because I'm using these tools all day, it's hard to shift gears sometimes and think, okay, How did I use these tools? Because I'm using them so comprehensively across my day as I provide legal services to my clients. So today I want to talk about something that I think is probably the most important thing that you need to bring to the table when you sit down to go to work as a lawyer, when you sit at that desk in the morning. And we're going to be doing some much longer videos on this, so go ahead and subscribe. Because this is going to be a concept you're going to want to ingrain in your brain if you want to succeed in the age of AI. The concept is this: we have been in an hourly billing mode as lawyers since the '70s. Didn't used to be like that. Clients demanded it because they just didn't want to pay some amorphous bill. They wanted to pay for time. And for the last 20 years, there's been a lot of pushback on the hourly billing Method, and clients have asked for alternatives. And we've come up with a couple of buzzwords like value billing, or we've got success fees. And these are all great innovations in how we might deliver services to a client. But in the age of AI, the one single principle that you need to be thinking about when you sit down at your desk is not hours. And if you're thinking about hours, if you think about how many hours you bill today, if you think about how many hours you bill this month, if you think about how many hours you bill this year, if that is your mentality, you are dead in the water as a lawyer. Because in the age of AI, there is so much more you can do for a client to provide value. So the number one thing that you need to be thinking about when you sit down at your desk is How do I use these AI tools in order to provide more value to my client today on this specific task, given this specific workflow? How do I provide more value? And I'm going to be providing you in some longer videos exactly how to go about doing that on specific tasks. But for right now, I want you thinking about getting your head out of hours and getting into value. If You start every single task with, how do I provide more value to the client on this task? How do I use AI tools to provide more value to clients given this task? You're going to be heading in the right direction. My name's Enrico. Go ahead and subscribe, share, comment. I'll answer all questions. Thank you for watching, and we'll see you in the next video.
