The Billable Hour Was Invented to Expand Access to Justice. Here’s How It Became Everyone’s Least Favourite Number

The billable hour, one of the most criticised metrics in the legal profession, wasn’t dreamed up by a Big Law partner trying to maximise revenue. Instead, the billable hour was created by a legal aid lawyer determined to make legal services fairer and ensure scarce resources weren’t wasted.

The Modern Counsel · 5 min read

 In 1913, a young Harvard Law graduate named Reginald Heber Smith took a job that, on paper, looked nothing like the origin story of one of the legal profession’s most polarising inventions. He became counsel at the Boston Legal Aid Society.

Smith’s problem wasn’t profit. It was scarcity. He was responsible for funding and staffing roughly 2,000 legal aid cases a year, on a shoestring budget, with only a handful of assistant counsel and clerical staff to help. To make that math work to know which cases were eating disproportionate time, where capacity was being wasted, and how to allocate scarce legal labour fairly across thousands of people who needed it, Smith needed data. So he started tracking time.

From legal aid tool to industry standard

What began as an accountability mechanism for an underfunded legal aid office became, over the following decades, the operating system of the entire legal profession. Smith went on to become managing partner of Hale and Dorr (today WilmerHale) from 1919 to 1956, and brought his timekeeping discipline with him, introducing accurate accounting methods, budgeting, and a mathematical system of profit distribution that, decades later, would calcify into the billable hour as we know it.

It didn’t become the dominant billing method overnight. For much of the early twentieth century, most lawyers still charged flat fees for common services, or simply submitted a bill for “services rendered” at the close of a matter. The shift to hourly billing as the default accelerated through the 1960s and 1970s, driven by corporate clients demanding more transparency into legal costs, the growth of in-house legal departments wanting comparable pricing, and a pivotal 1975 US Supreme Court decision, Goldfarb v. Virginia State Bar, which struck down mandatory minimum-fee schedules and forced the profession toward more granular, defensible pricing.

By the 1980s, six-minute increments, daily timesheets, and annual billing quotas were entrenched as the architecture of how lawyers got paid and how their value was measured.

The irony Reginald Heber Smith never saw coming

Here’s the part of the story that rarely gets told: Smith’s original intent had almost nothing to do with maximising firm revenue. He built the billable hour to bring fairness, efficiency, and accountability to a chronically under-resourced legal aid practice to make sure scarce lawyer-hours were allocated honestly and clients weren’t silently subsidising inefficiency.

What it became, in the hands of an industry built around growth targets and partner compensation models, was something closer to the opposite. Clients have long worried that hourly billing rewards inefficiency rather than penalising it; the slower the lawyer, the larger the bill. Lawyers, meanwhile, have spent decades navigating the very real pressure of hitting billing targets, often at real cost to wellbeing and work-life balance. The metric invented to protect resource-poor clients became, in its mature form, one of the most frequently cited sources of client distrust in the entire profession.

What comes after the hour

That tension hasn’t gone unnoticed by the people actually running firms. The profession has spent the last decade gradually testing alternatives to flat fees, subscriptions, and value-based pricing models that attempt to reward outcomes rather than hours logged. For firms willing to make the shift, it can be liberating: predictable revenue, clearer client conversations, and pricing that reflects actual value delivered rather than time spent fumbling toward it.

But the billable hour persists for a simple, structural reason: it’s deeply embedded in how firms currently track performance, compensate partners, and forecast revenue. Undoing a century of institutional habit isn’t a pricing decision; it’s an operating model decision, and most firms don’t have the underlying data infrastructure to make that leap confidently.

The Kenyan angle: this conversation is just getting started

African and Kenyan law firms are uniquely positioned to avoid many of the challenges that hourly billing has accumulated over a century in mature Western markets. As firms modernise their operations, they have an opportunity to build pricing models that are transparent, value-driven, and supported by accurate data from the outset rather than trying to restore trust later.

The key to that shift isn’t simply adopting a different pricing philosophy—it’s having visibility into how legal work is performed. A firm that can track time, monitor matter progress, measure resource allocation, and generate reliable reports can have informed conversations with clients about value instead of relying on estimates or month-end reconstruction.

This is where legal practice management platforms such as Smart Legal Africa make a meaningful difference. By combining matter management, time tracking, document management, workflow automation, legal accounting, and reporting in a single platform, Smart Legal Africa gives firms the data they need to price services confidently, improve profitability, and deliver greater transparency to clients.

A century after Reginald Heber Smith began tracking time by hand, the conversation is no longer just about billing hours. It’s about measuring value, improving efficiency, and building stronger client relationships.

The firms that thrive over the next decade won’t simply record time better—they’ll use technology to understand, demonstrate, and deliver value. That’s the future Smart Legal Africa is helping law firms build today.