The Hidden Tax on Innovation
Most lawyers think of the billable hour as neutral.
You do the work.
You bill the time.
You get paid.
Simple, right?
But here’s the challenge:
The billable hour quietly penalizes the very thing that makes your firm valuable—your ability to innovate.
When your revenue is tied to time spent, every improvement that makes you faster, smarter, or more efficient effectively costs you money.
Automate a task that used to take two hours?
Congratulations—you just cut your revenue in half.
Build a template that helps your team produce higher-quality work in less time?
Great for your clients. Terrible for your P&L.
So instead of rewarding efficiency, the billable hour system incentivizes stagnation.
It punishes process improvement.
It discourages investment in technology.
And it keeps you stuck in a cycle where “working harder” is the only path to “earning more.”
That’s not innovation—it’s survival.
Meanwhile, your clients—accustomed to transparency and predictability in every other aspect of their lives—can sense the misalignment. They know there’s something off about a model that charges more when you’re slower and less when you’re better.
Here’s the irony:
The firms that break free from the hourly mindset finally start to see what innovation really looks like in practice.
They begin to ask:
- How do we deliver results faster and more predictably?
- What outcomes truly matter to our clients?
- How can we package and price those outcomes in a way that rewards efficiency instead of punishing it?
That’s the shift—from hours to impact.
From busyness to business strategy.
From surviving the week to designing a practice that grows stronger with every improvement.
Because innovation shouldn’t be a liability.
It should be your firm’s greatest advantage.
If you’ve been rethinking how you price your work, you’re not alone.
The ADVance Bootcamp: Pricing Edition is a guided sprint that helps you reimagine how you price, package, and position your work—so your firm rewards innovation, not inefficiency.
We start soon, and you’re invited to join us.