Clio finds AI boosts law-firm capacity while some struggle with billable-hour targets

Law firms are reporting an awkward combination: AI lets them take on more work, yet some struggle to meet their billable-hour targets. Clio’s 2026 U.K. & Ireland Legal Insights Report, covered by CNBC on October 10, finds widespread AI use alongside gains that challenge how firms charge for their lawyers’ time.

More work, fewer hours to charge

The report from legal software company Clio says almost 90% of legal professionals in the U.K. and Ireland use AI. That adoption figure describes individual professionals. The findings about capacity, costs and billing describe firms, with different groups used for the efficiency results and the billable-hour finding.

Among firms using AI, almost 80% said they could handle more work without adding resources. More than 70% said AI reduced costs by taking on administrative work previously done by support staff. These are firms’ reported benefits, rather than independently measured productivity gains. The capacity finding concerns doing more with existing resources, not simply completing one task faster.

The billing result points in a less comfortable direction. About one in five firms that had widely adopted AI reported difficulty meeting billable-hour targets. That is a narrower group than all firms using AI. It also means the difficulty was reported by a minority, not that every firm adopting the technology faces the same problem.

The underlying tension is straightforward: many firms charge by the hour, while AI can shorten document drafting and review. Nick Rowles-Davies, founder and CEO of legal finance fund Lexolent, told CNBC: “You can't charge 16 hours for something that takes 16 seconds.” He identified standard documents as particularly exposed to automation.

A Deloitte survey cited by CNBC offers a forward-looking comparison. Senior legal leaders globally expect the share of work charged by the hour to fall from 72% to 44% over the next two to three years. That is an expectation, not a completed shift. Unlike Clio’s findings, it concerns a global group rather than the U.K. and Ireland.

A faster route to a draft does not automatically mean a faster route to competence.

Jorge Bestard, Harvey’s head of EMEA, speaking to CNBC

The work AI removes also taught the trade

Billing is not the only system built around time-consuming legal work. Mansoor Soomro, who leads Teesside University’s Future of Work Research Unit, told CNBC that repetitive assignments traditionally helped junior lawyers learn. Reviewing documents taught them what mattered, drafting contracts developed writing skills, and researching cases helped build legal reasoning.

In his comments to CNBC, Bestard said firms need to deliberately replace those learning opportunities as AI takes on the work. Rowles-Davies drew a related distinction between routine documents and complex advice: interpreting AI output and choosing the right strategy for a client still require human judgment. Faster production does not remove that responsibility.

Greater capacity is not the same as time off

Clio’s working-hours findings add another contrast. Some 51% of legal professionals work evenings, while 32% want to. For weekends, the figures are 22% working and 11% choosing to. Those measures describe the gap between actual schedules and preferred ones; they are not before-and-after measurements of what AI has done to working hours.

Clio’s lawyer-in-residence, Joshua Lenon, offered a positive account of the experience, telling CNBC that lawyers were saying their days were getting better as AI became more common. Whether efficiency ultimately improves working lives, however, depends on what firms do with the time they recover: greater capacity and better schedules are different outcomes.