“In the six and a half years since the onset of the Great Recession, the market for legal services has changed in fundamental—and probably irreversible—ways,” according to Georgetown Law’s “Report on the State of the Legal Market,” released this year. Most significantly, the power has shifted away from law firms and towards clients. “Purchasers of legal services are now insisting on value in legal spend,” says James W. Jones, a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of the Legal Profession at Georgetown Law and the lead author of the report. “And by value, they mean predictability, cost-effectiveness, and efficiency. Quality is assumed.”

Law firms are now facing more competition than they’re used to, according to Michael Abbott, the vice president of client management and global thought leadership at Thomson Reuters. More work has been shifted to in-house departments, and newly-founded firms have given clients more options for work such as document review that once went to firms. The industry has seen a dramatic increase in contract lawyers—which accounts for the success of some “New Model” firms—and increases in the use of digital technologies and outsourcing. As a result, James W. Jones says, firms are “scrambling” to adjust.

One firm that’s responding to these new market realities is Fenwick & West, which has been included in the American Lawyer list of top firms. Ralph Pais, the chair of the firm’s technology-transactions group, noticed an “inflection point” several years ago, at which clients weren’t satisfied with the high costs of day-to-day work and started looking for other options. Unwilling to let business walk out the door, Pais and his colleagues started a program 2010 called FLEX by Fenwick that offered more affordable services. Instead of being stuck with the traditional billable hour, FLEX clients purchase pre-paid blocks of attorney time or enlist an attorney to work a set number of days per week. The program has proved popular, doubling in size in its first two years and contributing in part to Fenwick & West’s revenue growth, which was singled out as legitimate, and not juiced, by American Lawyer.

Many firms have not been so quick to adapt. One reason may be that the billable hour is so deeply entrenched in the legal psyche. Or, as the Georgetown report posits, law firms may be “victims of [their] own success” prior to the financial crisis. While the leaders of the most successful firms may be understandably unmotivated to mess with a model that has made them very wealthy, the vast majority of firms need to come up with new ways respond to client demand for efficiency and better align the priorities of lawyer and client.

Moving away from the billable hour may be an important part of such a realignment. A recent study found that “alternative fee arrangements”—those not tied to the billable hour—were up from 5 percent of all transactions about seven years ago to 22 percent this year. And, according to Jones, this number becomes much higher if client-imposed budget caps on billable hours are included in the count. “This is really a fixed pricing that firms can bill up to,” Jones says.