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With AI transforming document-heavy tasks and the billable hour under threat, lawyers are re-examining their value-add and productivity habits. Alex Harding explores the future of working practice
The legal industry is in the midst of a great restructuring as lawyers of all varieties quickly grapple with how artificial intelligence (AI) will change working life. The general consensus in the last six months seems to have shifted towards a view that the revolution as it arrives could be more rapid and radical than many previously thought.
While there has been a lot of attention by law firms and chambers on which AI tools might be the best to adopt there has been less attention on how a solicitor or barrister’s typical working day might evolve with the advent of AI.
I believe that the missing piece in understanding the response to AI is how we now manage our daily personal productivity in response to these changes.
Before considering how personal productivity will need to evolve, we need to understand the two areas of current working practice for solicitors and barristers which are most likely to shift as a result of AI:
As the practice of law is fundamentally language based – statutes, contracts, case law and legal arguments are all expressed in natural language – many AI experts see legal services as being at the frontier of large language model (LLM) development. LLMs have the potential to short circuit much of the time-intensive work that lawyers have traditionally charged their clients for. Fundamentally, legal technology companies are seeking to correct the current ‘inefficiency’ of time spent on low-skill document work.
Document-heavy tasks like disclosure in a litigation, which previously would have taken up hundreds of hours of solicitors and counsel’s time, might soon be able to be processed in a fraction of that time using an LLM.
The likely effect of this is that the billable hour model for these types of time-intensive tasks will come under threat and it is possible that there will be a widespread shift to value-based fees or fixed fees as clients push for costs savings.
If solicitors and barristers are no longer principally remunerated for these tasks by reference to chargeable time spent but instead the outcomes they produce, then this will force lawyers to re-examine their personal productivity habits.
The incentive to be as productive and efficient with each hour spent will assume a new importance.
In the last 10 to 15 years the overwhelming focus for ‘productivity’ in the legal profession has been a culture of responsiveness.
The style of work that is almost universally adopted for most private practice and in-house lawyers (and even increasingly members of the Bar) is one which depends on constant connectivity with other people. Email, Slack (any instant messaging), WhatsApp, Teams and Zoom meetings, live documents or just picking up the phone whenever it rings.
Even if the lawyer’s underlying daily tasks are preparing for a trial, negotiating a transaction or reviewing a contract, the basic way work is organised is often around monitoring spontaneous incoming messages on a vast array of matters.
A major metric (perhaps now the metric) by which lawyers are judged is their responsiveness to these tools. Being always available, turning to things ‘quickly’, being able to ‘juggle’ several things at once is often lauded as being the defining trait of the best lawyers.
One of the effects of this style of work has been a growth in what productivity expert Cal Newport defines as ‘Shallow Work’:
Non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.
Newport contrasts this with ‘Deep Work’ which is:
Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill and are hard to replicate.
The problem is that we have a generation of lawyers who have prioritised responsiveness and ‘Shallow Work’ at precisely the moment that AI is about to render those skills far, far less valuable.
AI may teach lawyers an important lesson: Email is not a job.
AI will obviously impact technical legal research and case strategy but the lowest hanging fruit for AI to replace is precisely the culture of responsiveness and ‘task management’ that has grown to be ubiquitous in all major law firms (and parts of the Bar). Emails, instant messaging, constant calls, action lists, coordination, document management – all the things that many lawyers currently spend a significant portion of the day doing – are the easiest functions for AI to automate or significantly reduce in volume.
If the billable hour model is under threat for document-heavy tasks and much of the Shallow Work associated with connectivity and responsiveness may soon be able to be automated – how should the modern lawyer think about personal productivity?
I think the answer is that modern legal work needs to be increasingly cognitive.
In order for lawyers to continue to offer real value to their clients and to compete in a cost-conscious legal market, lawyers need to rediscover the value of what Newport terms ‘Deep Work’; work which is not easy to replicate and which offers genuine human expertise and insight to complex problems.
However, from a personal productivity perspective, the current working culture in the legal industry is often not designed to facilitate this type of work.
I think there are three main problems with the legal industry’s current approach to productivity which is limiting opportunities for the type of ‘Deep Work’ which is now so vital:
Taking each of those in turn:
A 2019 study showed that the average knowledge worker is now sending and receiving 126 business emails per day, which works out to about one every four minutes. Separately, a company called RescueTime, which provides computer time-tracking software, calculated that its users were checking email or instant messenger tools like Slack once every six minutes on average.
Lawyers of all varieties, including barristers, now often have their days split up into dozens of fragments of interruption.
The problem for productivity is that neuroscientists who have studied modern knowledge work have identified that our brains are not functionally able to multitask as we think they are. Our prefrontal cortex which is at the front of the brain controls what we focus on and it can service only one attention target at a time. The result is that with the rise in constant connectivity and repeated interruptions Deep Work quality is declining significantly.
‘Pseudo Productivity’ is defined by Newport as:
The use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort .
In law firms at least, I think there has undeniably been a growth in Shallow Work and Pseudo Productivity in the last 5-10 years.
The average associate’s to-do list will include a vast number of essentially administrative tasks. Now partly this is unavoidably the feature of managing complex litigation but I think there has also been a cultural ‘creep’ and acceptance in law firms allowing a growth in ‘Shallow Work’. The challenge for the Bar is that as associates are concerned with maintaining the constant flow of shallow administrative work, more and more of this Shallow Work product is being passed to counsel teams and distracting from Deep Work.
My speculation is that the majority of lawyers on an average day do not think about a model daily routine which would optimise their productivity.
The majority of lawyers do two things. First, you sit down at your computer in the morning and just start replying to the random selection of emails that have landed overnight. There is no thought to the relative importance, urgency or subject matter of the emails you just start ‘working’ by replying to everything that’s in front of you because it appears necessary to do so.
The second thing is that when someone asks whether you can do a call or a meeting at a certain time that day, you glance at your calendar, see some blank space and say yes you can do any time between 9-12.
The effect of these two habits is that each working day often becomes a random disjointed series of tasks which are not being led by you but are entirely reactive to other people’s requests. The blocks of time in which you could feasibly do your actual substantive Deep Work become randomly split up by other people’s availability and questions on email.
In the context of AI, personal productivity and optimising every hour of your time has never been more important. This means focusing on ‘Deep Work’ to produce high-quality legal advice which is hard to replicate.
However, as I have explained the legal industry seems to have at least three structural trends which are currently frustrating this style of work.
The good news is that there is an answer.
In the last few years there has been a significant growth in the research and academic literature around personal productivity, work optimisation and time management. Lessons from this research include:
I recently gave a talk at Lincoln’s Inn entitled ‘A Productivity Crisis in Law: Practical Ways to Work Smarter’ in which I attempted to summarise these principles and apply them to life at the Bar.
As we embrace the AI revolution, barristers will learn to work with new and exciting technologies, but it will be equally as important for them to learn how to manage their own personal productivity.
References
Alex Harding is a barrister and Head of Claims at HWF Partners, a specialist transactional risk insurance brokerage. Alex also provides talks to law firms and chambers on how lawyers can improve personal productivity.
The legal industry is in the midst of a great restructuring as lawyers of all varieties quickly grapple with how artificial intelligence (AI) will change working life. The general consensus in the last six months seems to have shifted towards a view that the revolution as it arrives could be more rapid and radical than many previously thought.
While there has been a lot of attention by law firms and chambers on which AI tools might be the best to adopt there has been less attention on how a solicitor or barrister’s typical working day might evolve with the advent of AI.
I believe that the missing piece in understanding the response to AI is how we now manage our daily personal productivity in response to these changes.
Before considering how personal productivity will need to evolve, we need to understand the two areas of current working practice for solicitors and barristers which are most likely to shift as a result of AI:
As the practice of law is fundamentally language based – statutes, contracts, case law and legal arguments are all expressed in natural language – many AI experts see legal services as being at the frontier of large language model (LLM) development. LLMs have the potential to short circuit much of the time-intensive work that lawyers have traditionally charged their clients for. Fundamentally, legal technology companies are seeking to correct the current ‘inefficiency’ of time spent on low-skill document work.
Document-heavy tasks like disclosure in a litigation, which previously would have taken up hundreds of hours of solicitors and counsel’s time, might soon be able to be processed in a fraction of that time using an LLM.
The likely effect of this is that the billable hour model for these types of time-intensive tasks will come under threat and it is possible that there will be a widespread shift to value-based fees or fixed fees as clients push for costs savings.
If solicitors and barristers are no longer principally remunerated for these tasks by reference to chargeable time spent but instead the outcomes they produce, then this will force lawyers to re-examine their personal productivity habits.
The incentive to be as productive and efficient with each hour spent will assume a new importance.
In the last 10 to 15 years the overwhelming focus for ‘productivity’ in the legal profession has been a culture of responsiveness.
The style of work that is almost universally adopted for most private practice and in-house lawyers (and even increasingly members of the Bar) is one which depends on constant connectivity with other people. Email, Slack (any instant messaging), WhatsApp, Teams and Zoom meetings, live documents or just picking up the phone whenever it rings.
Even if the lawyer’s underlying daily tasks are preparing for a trial, negotiating a transaction or reviewing a contract, the basic way work is organised is often around monitoring spontaneous incoming messages on a vast array of matters.
A major metric (perhaps now the metric) by which lawyers are judged is their responsiveness to these tools. Being always available, turning to things ‘quickly’, being able to ‘juggle’ several things at once is often lauded as being the defining trait of the best lawyers.
One of the effects of this style of work has been a growth in what productivity expert Cal Newport defines as ‘Shallow Work’:
Non-cognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend not to create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.
Newport contrasts this with ‘Deep Work’ which is:
Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill and are hard to replicate.
The problem is that we have a generation of lawyers who have prioritised responsiveness and ‘Shallow Work’ at precisely the moment that AI is about to render those skills far, far less valuable.
AI may teach lawyers an important lesson: Email is not a job.
AI will obviously impact technical legal research and case strategy but the lowest hanging fruit for AI to replace is precisely the culture of responsiveness and ‘task management’ that has grown to be ubiquitous in all major law firms (and parts of the Bar). Emails, instant messaging, constant calls, action lists, coordination, document management – all the things that many lawyers currently spend a significant portion of the day doing – are the easiest functions for AI to automate or significantly reduce in volume.
If the billable hour model is under threat for document-heavy tasks and much of the Shallow Work associated with connectivity and responsiveness may soon be able to be automated – how should the modern lawyer think about personal productivity?
I think the answer is that modern legal work needs to be increasingly cognitive.
In order for lawyers to continue to offer real value to their clients and to compete in a cost-conscious legal market, lawyers need to rediscover the value of what Newport terms ‘Deep Work’; work which is not easy to replicate and which offers genuine human expertise and insight to complex problems.
However, from a personal productivity perspective, the current working culture in the legal industry is often not designed to facilitate this type of work.
I think there are three main problems with the legal industry’s current approach to productivity which is limiting opportunities for the type of ‘Deep Work’ which is now so vital:
Taking each of those in turn:
A 2019 study showed that the average knowledge worker is now sending and receiving 126 business emails per day, which works out to about one every four minutes. Separately, a company called RescueTime, which provides computer time-tracking software, calculated that its users were checking email or instant messenger tools like Slack once every six minutes on average.
Lawyers of all varieties, including barristers, now often have their days split up into dozens of fragments of interruption.
The problem for productivity is that neuroscientists who have studied modern knowledge work have identified that our brains are not functionally able to multitask as we think they are. Our prefrontal cortex which is at the front of the brain controls what we focus on and it can service only one attention target at a time. The result is that with the rise in constant connectivity and repeated interruptions Deep Work quality is declining significantly.
‘Pseudo Productivity’ is defined by Newport as:
The use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort .
In law firms at least, I think there has undeniably been a growth in Shallow Work and Pseudo Productivity in the last 5-10 years.
The average associate’s to-do list will include a vast number of essentially administrative tasks. Now partly this is unavoidably the feature of managing complex litigation but I think there has also been a cultural ‘creep’ and acceptance in law firms allowing a growth in ‘Shallow Work’. The challenge for the Bar is that as associates are concerned with maintaining the constant flow of shallow administrative work, more and more of this Shallow Work product is being passed to counsel teams and distracting from Deep Work.
My speculation is that the majority of lawyers on an average day do not think about a model daily routine which would optimise their productivity.
The majority of lawyers do two things. First, you sit down at your computer in the morning and just start replying to the random selection of emails that have landed overnight. There is no thought to the relative importance, urgency or subject matter of the emails you just start ‘working’ by replying to everything that’s in front of you because it appears necessary to do so.
The second thing is that when someone asks whether you can do a call or a meeting at a certain time that day, you glance at your calendar, see some blank space and say yes you can do any time between 9-12.
The effect of these two habits is that each working day often becomes a random disjointed series of tasks which are not being led by you but are entirely reactive to other people’s requests. The blocks of time in which you could feasibly do your actual substantive Deep Work become randomly split up by other people’s availability and questions on email.
In the context of AI, personal productivity and optimising every hour of your time has never been more important. This means focusing on ‘Deep Work’ to produce high-quality legal advice which is hard to replicate.
However, as I have explained the legal industry seems to have at least three structural trends which are currently frustrating this style of work.
The good news is that there is an answer.
In the last few years there has been a significant growth in the research and academic literature around personal productivity, work optimisation and time management. Lessons from this research include:
I recently gave a talk at Lincoln’s Inn entitled ‘A Productivity Crisis in Law: Practical Ways to Work Smarter’ in which I attempted to summarise these principles and apply them to life at the Bar.
As we embrace the AI revolution, barristers will learn to work with new and exciting technologies, but it will be equally as important for them to learn how to manage their own personal productivity.
References
With AI transforming document-heavy tasks and the billable hour under threat, lawyers are re-examining their value-add and productivity habits. Alex Harding explores the future of working practice
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