Sitting at a chamber music concert a couple weeks ago in West Palm Beach, enveloped in the sound of the stringed instruments, I suddenly had a realization, "Wow, I did not pick up my phone once in the past hour!"

This particular chamber piece was Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals. It is a playful and whimsical depiction of various animals in fourteen movements, with the instruments "talking" to each other and going back and forth in bite-sized interludes. You can almost see the animals in your mind's eye when you hear it. And you can also imagine a time, back in the day, when musicians would sit around and have fun improvising something like this late into the night until the light of the candle burned out.

Then, a second thought occurred to me, "I bet these musicians charge for their time teaching music lessons by the hour." And that thought made me sad.

How could something so beautiful as music be put in a box? How could we subdivide it so ruthlessly by scheduled appointment times? For certain things, should we really be constrained by the stopwatch?

From Natural Rythms to the Stopwatch

I'm not the first person to question how the measurement of time has reshaped human life. In agrarian societies, life moved with natural rhythms - the sun, the moon, the tides. Today, in an industrial and post-industrial world, everything is scheduled. We clock in, we clock out. Meetings start and end on the hour. Every task has a designated slot.

But now, with the rise of artificial intelligence, we are entering yet another transformation. Another type of industrial revolution.

Tasks that once took hours or days can now be completed in minutes. Are we even equipped to recognize that shift? Or, are we so conditioned to measure value in terms of time spent that we struggle to accept when something is simply..."done?"

A Lawyer's Perspective on Time

As a lawyer who bills by the hour, this question is not theoretical - it is deeply practical. How does AI change how I think about billing time?

So far, AI has made me a better lawyer, but not necessarily a more efficient one. Sure, I can get clients answers faster and leverage technology to cut down on administrative time, but I would never rely solely on AI to provide any sort of legal judgment, drafting or legal analysis. It is wrong too often. At its current stage, AI is not yet capable of handling the full complexity of legal work at the level my clients expect. But I welcome the day when it is.

I look forward to spending less time triple-checking section references, commas and defined terms - and more time doing what truly matters: negotiating, structuring deals and thinking strategically.

As we transition to the phase where AI can handle many of the more sophisticated legal tasks, we need to develop a new capability as lawyers - ignoring the time spent on something and recognizing when the work is actually completed.

Past Shift: From Typewriter to Word Processing

When I was working at a large law firm straight out of law school, one of the older partners close to retirement told me something like, "You know, back in my day, these legal documents were so much shorter..."

He then walked over to his file cabinet and pulled out a promissory note and mortgage, just a few sheets of paper in all, and said, "This was it. This is everything we documented for a large commercial real estate loan. We had to type everything out on a typewriter by hand. If you wanted to make an edit, you'd make the edit on the typewriter, manually show the changes, and send your document by mail or courier to the counterparty's lawyer."

The secretary overheard our conversation and jumped in, showing me what the typing paper used to look like, with carbon copy sheets of paper behind the main typing sheet, and how when you would have to correct something with white out, you'd have to correct all three sheets.

When Word Processing came on the scene, no one looked at it and thought, "Let's keep doing what we've always been doing and draft Promissory Notes that are one page long and Mortgages that are five pages long...."

No, they thought, "Wow, we have all these resources, let's make 200+ page loan agreements, 30+ page Mortgages and 20 other loan documents, because what's stopping us?? All the nuances and "delicious ambiguities" (as my old law school professor would say) that the old technology couldn't handle can now be addressed! And, better yet, they'll even need to hire lawyers to read and interpret the documents!"

Perhaps that's a little too cynical of a view. But the bottom line is that when technology made lawyers more efficient, they made the work more complex. And I see that trend happening with AI too, unfortunately.

The Real Shift: Redefining "Done"

The biggest transition AI may force upon the legal industry is redefining what it means for work to be "done".

What happens when a purchase and sale agreement can be drafted perfectly in five minutes? Would we even recognize it? Or would we assume something must be wrong simply because it didn't take longer?

We have spent decades as lawyers equating time with value. Untangling that relationship will require a fundamental shift in mindset.

The Human Limits of Efficiency

There is also a human side to this conversation that cannot be ignored.

If AI makes us dramatically more efficient, what will we do with that time saved? Will we simply take on exponentially more clients or matters? I'm not sure the human nervous system is built for that.

When I onboard a new client, they don't just occupy time on my calendar, they occupy space in my mind. They become part of the background processing that happens during quiet moments, where insights and ideas often emerge.

Humans are not designed to operate like machines. There are limits to how many matters and clients each attorney can realistically serve in the same type of way that I currently do now. Of course, if the service is more impersonal and creative insights and ideas are not required for the task at hand, I suppose it theoretically is possible to carry a greater caseload. But that hasn't historically been how I've practiced law.

How We Think About Billing at Maher Law

The industry norm in law has been to pay lawyers on an "effort in" basis (traditionally time-based) as opposed to a "value generated" basis, and that has been our firm's model to date. It is what our clients expect and demand.

Throughout my career, I've heard many lawyers say something like, "But I'm so much more efficient than Sally down the hall, so why do her billable hours and collections numbers look better than mine when I get it done in half the time and with better quality?"

But, as a lifelong student of economics, I understand why clients would want to incentivize their lawyers to not cut corners and pay for the effort spent, especially under circumstances where value generated is harder to measure.

Clients address the quality/efficiency issue by simply picking better lawyers, and usually those lawyers have a higher hourly rate for the particular geographic region.

For lawyers using value-based billing, they really have to demonstrate how the value they generate is higher than the value generated by the guy down the street billing by the hour (not just that they created some value by being involved).

This is an evolving conversation, and I welcome any and all input from my clients and prospective clients on this matter.

First Principles for the Future

1. AI will be transformative. It will reshape much of what lawyers do, and I'm excited for that future.
2. Efficiency must be paired with discipline. With any technological change, we need to be cautious and disciplined about adoption. It is the lawyers who are always ultimately responsible for the legal advice they provide.
3. Adaptability and Openness are Key. We must always be open to new ways of doing things and must constantly adapt.
4. Strengthening Human Judgment. Human judgment is a superpower. We must strengthen our ability to sift out the good from the bad and make recommendations based on sound judgment.
5. Establishing Clear Benchmarks. We must have a clear sense of when something is "done," and establish a set of guidelines that allows us to confidently move forward with a legal task once the guidelines have been satisfied. Change is hard, but we will never see efficiency gains if we only allow AI to supplement the process we are already doing, or use it to only add complexity and length to documents.

A View From the Next Generation 

By: Alyssa Jean-Marie, Legal Intern at Maher Law, PLLC

They call young people the billionaires of time. Yet for newer generations entering the workforce, time feels anything but abundant. It feels fast, limited, and constantly slipping away. There is also an expectation to learn, grow, and master concepts within a specific period of time. But who decides how quickly something should be understood? Who determines when knowledge of a concept is “mastered”?

The idea that goals should be accomplished within a short period makes one feel as if success is measured by speed rather than depth. Demanding online deadlines makes it feel as if our lives revolve around dated tasks. To me, time creates suspense. It is a looming reminder of things not yet accomplished. As a college student, that feeling is constant. There is always something due, something pending, something ahead. At the same time, time can also act as a motivator. For a procrastinator, the clock becomes a challenge, a race against time where pressure creates productivity.

But where does this feeling come from? How has our society been structured around time? Time originally existed as a way to track natural cycles, for agricultural seasons or religious practices. As society evolved, the concept of time began to shift. Karl Marx argued that time is not neutral, but shaped by social and economic systems. In this framework, the time you put into something becomes directly tied to its value.

In modern Western society, we see this clearly through the workforce and hourly wages. Time is translated into money. The longer you work, the more you earn. This creates the belief that the amount of time spent on something determines its worth. But is this always the case? Some cultures measure value differently, placing less emphasis on monetary systems, and more on community living. 

Even in economics, time plays a central role. Money grows over time through investment. The idea of delayed gratification reinforces the belief that time itself produces value. But this raises a deeper question, is time creating value, or are we assigning value to that time?

The rise of artificial intelligence complicates this even further. We are now seeing data, ideas, and entire responses synthesized and produced within seconds. But does speed make something less valuable? Some may argue that it does, because it lacks human depth and lived understanding. Others may see it as efficient and innovative.

Humans are not automatic processing machines. We are not designed to think, create, and produce at the speed of algorithms. Quality work often requires time for reflection, revision, and deeper understanding. While some people may think faster than others, true understanding has levels and it cannot always be rushed.

The addition of artificial intelligence has been both a resource and a setback. While it is useful for small tasks, organization, and idea formation, it also creates an assumption that students’ work is not fully their own. This has led institutions to make assignments more rigorous, but it has also created a culture of doubt.

I have personally been accused of using AI in writing that was 100 percent my own. As students we try to expand our thinking, and present the best of our abilities. Unfortunately, the fear of being questioned for writing “above our level” will always be present. This creates a contradiction. If I cannot apply what I have learned without being doubted, am I truly being encouraged to learn? If I feel the need to simplify my thinking just to be believed, is progress actually happening?

AI was introduced as a way to save time and increase efficiency. But it also forces us to reconsider what time should represent. Is time simply a measure of productivity, or should it also reflect the depth and thought we put into our work?

For this generation, time is no longer just something we manage. It is something we are constantly trying to keep up with, while also trying not to lose ourselves within it. Maybe the real challenge is not learning how to move faster, but learning how to value the time we take to think, to understand, and to grow.

A Small Challenge

So here's a simple experiment:

Turn off the clock.

Put away your screen.

Go on a run or do something creative without a time-based end.

See what happens.

You might be surprised what comes up when time is no longer the thing you're measuring.

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