What happens to the billable hour when an agent does the first draft

When an associate's four-hour first draft becomes a forty-minute review, the hour does not disappear — it gets written down at the billing committee, usually without anyone naming the cause. Realization drops and nobody can point to a decision that caused it.

Reprice the deliverable rather than the hour, for work whose scope is predictable. Hold the hourly rate and take on more matters per timekeeper, where demand supports it. Or share the gain explicitly with the client in exchange for volume commitment.

All three work. What does not work is leaving the question to individual timekeepers, which is what most firms are doing right now.