Why haven’t litigation costs gone down?

For all the talk of “integrating transformational technology,” law firms have shown little meaningful improvement in the cost of generating work product in complex litigation. Why?

The bottleneck is not the technology. The bottleneck is the incentive structure in which lawyers work.

Lawyers are paid for their time, often between $600–$1,200 per hour in major markets. Even if they could, why would any rational person dramatically reduce such highly compensated hours in a hunt for efficiency gains? They usually will not.

The truth is that already today high-caliber litigation work product can be delivered at substantially lower cost. We have machine superintelligence in our pockets, after all.

Of course, lawyers must still exercise judgment and meet the professional duties of competence, diligence, and confidentiality. That should be a given.

But a skilled lawyer’s judgment and expertise can now ride on a far superior cost structure—if we are willing to change how we are organized and how work product is compensated.

Bionic Law tackles one critical link in this value chain: providing complex litigation work product on a per-item basis for competitive flat fees, with fast turnaround times and backed by a service-satisfaction refund policy.

That is how incentives are aligned, by rewarding quality and efficiency directly, rather than hours expended.