For years, the prediction was that AI would shrink the hours lawyers bill and push firms toward flat fees. It hasn’t happened, at least not yet.

A recent Above the Law piece by Joe Patrice looks at 8am’s latest billing data from more than 60,000 small and mid-size firms. Flat fees actually dipped, from 16% to 15% of all bills, and nearly half of firms still bill entirely by the hour. Meanwhile, generative AI use has more than doubled, and hours per case are climbing. Patrice’s explanation is that AI doesn’t make the work smaller. It makes it bigger. It surfaces new arguments, new research angles, and new work that lean teams never had time for before. He compares it to the Jevons paradox: when steam engines became more efficient, Britain burned more coal, not less.

There’s another reason AI isn’t saving time across the full matter. Someone still has to verify the output. That means checking that cited cases exist, that they say what the AI claims, and that they’re still good law.

So where does efficiency actually come from? TRAINING & EDUCATION.

 If AI is expanding the work, the time your people spend on everything around that work matters more than ever. That includes:

• Microsoft 365 skills. Fighting with Word formatting, styles, and track changes in a brief that AI helped draft is still non-billable friction.
• Document management (NetDocuments and iManage). Lost versions, mis-filed documents, and slow searches cost time on every matter. That cost grows as the volume of work product grows.
• PDF software. Redaction, Bates numbering, and combining exhibits are basic tasks that become slow, risky bottlenecks when people only half-know the tools.
• Focused AI training on your tools. Generic prompting tips don’t help much. Your people need to know how to use the AI built into the platforms your firm has actually licensed, and how to review its output efficiently and ethically.

The 8am data shows something interesting. At firms with 11 or more employees, the share of tracked time that made it onto a bill rose from 44% to 49%. Firms are getting better at turning effort into billable value. Training is how you keep that ratio moving in the right direction. When your lawyers and staff work fluently in their core tools, less time leaks into friction and more goes into the work clients will pay for.

The bottom line

AI isn’t a substitute for knowing the basics. It raises the stakes on them. The firms that come out ahead will pair smart AI adoption with a workforce that truly knows the tools it uses every day.

That’s what we do at Savvy Training & Consulting. We offer NetDocuments, iManage, Microsoft 365, and PDF training, and more, along with focused AI training built around the platforms your firm uses. Contact us to talk about a training plan for 2027.