Deloitte put a number on what AI does to your invoice. In a 2026 survey, it asked 121 corporate legal leaders, the general counsels and heads of legal who hire outside firms, what they expect to pay once AI cuts into the work. They answered with figures.
The report is built for large in-house legal departments, and Deloitte sells them the transformation it prescribes. McKinsey measured how much of your work AI can do. Deloitte measured what your clients plan to do about it. Set that aside and read what the clients said, because the clients in this survey are a clean proxy for the clients of any law firm reading this: people who used to accept the hourly bill and have stopped.
In a meeting you’re not in, someone is writing down the number that replaces your hourly rate.
What the clients expect to pay
They put the share of legal work billed by the hour at 72 percent now and 44 percent within two to three years. Over the same window they expect to cut what they spend on outside firms by 20 to 40 percent, partly by pulling work back in-house and partly by keeping AI’s savings on what stays.
That’s a line in next year’s budget. The pressure to pay you less isn’t new, but AI is the first thing that lets clients follow through on it. Reduction in cost was the single benefit these clients wanted most from their firms’ AI use, ahead of better quality and more innovative pricing. When the people who sign your invoices rank cost first, the repricing is already under way.
Silence is a pricing decision
The finding that should worry firms is the silence. Fifty-eight percent of those same leaders said their outside firms rarely or never bring up AI. The clients are planning the cut. Their firms have said nothing.
Adopting the tools and getting credit for them are separate jobs. Only four percent of these clients had seen a concrete benefit from a firm’s AI use, so a firm can spend a year on pilots and tooling and still hand the client a full-price invoice with nothing attached to it.
When you don’t raise it, the client does, and they arrive with the reduction picked and the efficiency math already done. You can hear it in what your clients say about AI when you’re not in the room. Whoever opens the subject sets the terms, and right now that’s the client. Opening it well means bringing the client a repriced version of the work: the same result, priced as a flat fee or an outcome instead of an hourly bill.
Start that conversation and there’s still room in it. Forty-two percent of the clients said AI savings should be split between firm and client, not kept by one side. The opening is real, and it closes the moment the client settles the split alone.
This isn’t only a legal story
Deloitte asked legal departments, but nothing in the mechanism is specific to law. Accounting firms, consulting firms, and financial advisory firms sell what law firms sell: expert hours their clients can now run a first pass on themselves. The survey is the legal version of a conversation already underway in every professional services market where the client got AI the same week you did.
The decision is the same for every firm: name what clients will still pay for once the hours collapse, then rebuild two or three offerings around it so the price holds. If you want the size of the exposure first, the repricing calculator runs your sector’s math. Then the work is to change what you sell before the client changes what they’ll pay.
The split is still open, but not for long. Raise it, or read what your client decided for you on the next invoice.