AI AND THE LEGAL BILL

Artificial intelligence can now perform in minutes legal work that once required hours. Should clients still be charged as though those hours were worked?

In AI and the Legal Bill, Nancy Salloum examines one of the most consequential-and uncomfortable-questions facing the modern legal profession: what happens to legal fees when artificial intelligence dramatically reduces the human labour required to produce legal work?

AI can assist lawyers with research, document review, evidence organization, contract analysis, chronologies, summaries, drafting, and other traditionally labour-intensive tasks. Yet much of the legal profession continues to operate through a billing system built around human time.

This book challenges lawyers, law firms, courts, regulators, and clients to reconsider that model.

The argument is not that lawyers should be replaced by artificial intelligence or denied fair compensation. Lawyers remain responsible for professional judgment, strategy, advocacy, confidentiality, verification, and the consequences of their advice.

The question is whether clients should continue paying for labour that technology has eliminated.

Through an examination of hourly billing, fixed fees, AI-assisted legal work, professional responsibility, access to justice, fee transparency, regulatory reform, and the possibility of undisclosed AI use, AI and the Legal Bill proposes a new economic relationship between lawyers and their clients.

The book calls for:

• honest recording of actual professional time;
• greater use of fixed, capped, staged, and alternative fees;
• transparent treatment of AI-assisted work and technology costs;
• strong confidentiality and verification standards;
• accountability when AI use is misrepresented;
• responsible regulatory reform; and
• sharing the economic benefits of AI efficiency with clients and the justice system.

At its heart is a simple principle:

If lawyers sell time, the time must be real. If they sell expertise and results, the pricing model should say so honestly.

AI does not have to diminish the legal profession.

It can allow lawyers to spend less time on repetitive production and more time on what clients genuinely need from them: judgment, strategy, advocacy, expertise, responsibility, and trust.

AI and the Legal Bill is a call for a legal profession that is faster, fairer, more transparent, more affordable-and ultimately more accessible to the people it exists to serve.