Meet The Non-Billable
The view from the seat nobody's billing for
My mother was a finance and accounting woman in north Louisiana, which meant she knew what things cost. Not what people said they cost, or what the market would bear, or what you could get away with charging if nobody checked your math. What things actually cost, down to the decimal, in the quiet way that numbers don’t lie if you’re willing to sit with them long enough.
My father did just about everything else a father in Louisiana does. He could fix what was broken, build what was missing, and figure out the rest as he went. There was no job description for what he did. There didn’t need to be.
I didn’t follow either path exactly. But I ended up somewhere between my mother’s instinct for what things cost and my father’s habit of building what doesn’t exist yet. It was just in a stranger place than either of them probably imagined.
For the last decade, I’ve worked in the economics of law.
This is simply a fancy way of saying that I am typically the person in the room who isn’t a lawyer. I started at law firms, in pricing, the back office where you learn that the rate on the engagement letter and the rate that actually gets collected and the rate it costs to deliver are all different numbers living different lives. From there I moved to one of the largest tech companies in the world, where I learned how to manage legal spend at genuine scale for some of the most consequential issues of our time.
Now I spend my days inside the legal department of a Fortune 10 with a remit that covers everything from outside counsel strategy, rate negotiations, law firm hiring, and RFPs to investment strategy and corporate strategy. It’s the full surface area of how a legal department decides where its money and trust go.
But at night, after my kids go to bed, I am building an AI company for legal teams. A real one, with real customers. I write code in my terminal, ship features and talk to our users about what’s broken in their work, then I go try to build the thing that fixes it.
And in between, in the ordinary mornings, on the ordinary calls, I use these same tools to do my day job. Not in a pilot program. Not in a sandbox with guardrails and a steering committee. I draft with AI. I model with it. I build automations that do work that used to take a team. I run it in the background the way a previous generation ran Excel: constantly, instinctively, without thinking of it as innovation.
None of that makes me an expert in everything. But it does mean I’ve been handed an unusual set of keys, to rooms that don’t normally open onto each other.
There’s a thing that happens in golf when you play a golf course for the first time.
You stand on the tee and you see what the architect wants you to. The bunker guarding the left side. The fairway bending right. The flag tucked behind a ridge you can’t quite read from two hundred yards out. It looks like a decision. Left or right. Safe or aggressive.
But if you’ve walked the course beforehand, if you’ve seen it from behind the green, from inside the tree line, from the maintenance path the members never take, you know the hole differently. You’ve seen the drainage pattern the architect buried under the fairway. You’ve noticed that the bunker everyone avoids is actually the best angle to the pin. You understand that what looked like a risk from the tee is the play the designer intended all along.
You don’t know the hole better than the person standing on the tee. But you know it more completely. And in golf, as in most things, the more complete view tends to be the more honest one.
The legal industry is in the middle of something like that right now. AI is redesigning the course. Every hole, every angle, every assumption about where the hazards are and what a good score looks like. And knowing it completely means we must look at it from different points of view, not just the tee.
The law firm pricing consultant sees a billing model under pressure. The AI vendor sees a product demo. The general counsel sees a budget line. The columnist sees the same column he’s been writing since 2009, The death of the billable hour, any day now, and wonders if this is finally the year it comes true.
I’ve been fortunate to walk this course of legal from a few different sides. Buy side, sell side, build side, and the daily practice of using these tools on real work. Not just in a conference room. Not just in a strategy document. It is in the ordinary Tuesday morning of doing a job and building a company at the same time.
The Non-Billable is written from this spot.
Some weeks I’ll write about the economics, what rate increases actually mean when you set them next to revenue-per-lawyer growth, and why the story the legal industry tells itself doesn’t always match the spreadsheet underneath it. Some weeks I’ll write about what I’m building and what I’m learning, which are usually the same thing. Some weeks I’ll write about what AI is doing to legal work in real time with no vendor pitch and no panic attached.
And woven in will be a little bit about different things, entirely. Louisiana. Fatherhood. What a golf course can teach you about the difference between seeing and understanding. I have come to know that the best writing about an industry usually comes from someone willing to step outside of it long enough to remember what matters.
Every law firm has a billing system, and that system has a category for every person who touches the work. Partners, associates, paralegals, contract attorneys. They are all billable. All accounted for. All measured in six-minute increments against a rate that someone, somewhere, agreed to pay.
And then there’s the person who doesn’t appear in that system at all. The one who negotiates the rates. Reads the invoices. Builds the models. Questions the math. The one who sits at the center of the economics without ever billing a minute of time.
I am non-billable.
I think in spreadsheets, write in paragraphs, and build in terminals.
Welcome.