About Non-Billable

The short version

Non-Billable is a weekly newsletter about the business of law in an era when the business model is being rewritten in real time. It’s written by someone who isn’t a lawyer — but who has spent a decade inside the economics of legal, from law firm pricing desks to Silicon Valley to the legal department of a Fortune 10 manufacturer, and who is simultaneously building an AI company for legal teams.

Some weeks it’s about the numbers. Some weeks it’s about the tools. Some weeks it’s about Louisiana, or fatherhood, or what a golf course teaches you about the difference between seeing and understanding.

One man’s view from the seat nobody’s billing for.

Who writes this

My name is Aaron Boersma. I grew up in north Louisiana, where my mother worked in finance and accounting and my father did just about everything else. Between the two of them, I inherited an instinct for what things cost and a habit of building what doesn’t exist yet.

I started my career in law firm pricing, in the back office where you learn that the rate on the engagement letter and the rate that actually gets collected are two different numbers living two different lives. I moved to legal operations at one of the largest technology companies in the world. Now I sit inside the legal department of a Fortune 10 manufacturer, where my work covers outside counsel strategy, rate negotiations, law firm hiring, RFPs, investment strategy, and corporate strategy — the full surface area of how a legal department decides where its money and its trust go.

At night, after my kids go to bed, I build an AI company for legal teams. I write code in my terminal. I ship features. And in between, I use these same tools to do my day job, drafting, modeling, automating, building, not in a sandbox, but in the ordinary morning of real work.

I am not a lawyer. I think in spreadsheets, write in paragraphs, and build in terminals.

Who this is for

General counsel and law department leaders who want an honest view of where legal is headed, from someone inside the machine. Legal ops professionals who live in the numbers. Anyone who suspects the legal industry’s operating model is overdue for a reckoning and wants to read someone willing to say so plainly.

What to expect

A new piece every week. No vendor pitch. No consultant-speak. No predictions about the death of the billable hour from someone who’s never negotiated a rate.

Just the view from here.

Subscribe for free and it shows up in your inbox. That’s it.