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5 Stetson Bus. L. Rev. [i] (2025-2026)

handle is hein.journals/setnbisr5 and id is 1 raw text is: STETSON BUSINESS LAW REVIEW VOLUME 5 FALL 2025 ISSUE 1 AI & The Law ARTICLES* Rethinking Generative AI's Performance on the Bar Exam and on Law School Exams D. Benjamin Barros Alexis M. Moore Griffin C. Barros-King 1 Inspired by a study that GPT4 performed well enough on the Uniform Bar Exam to achieve a passing score, we gave GPT4 a property law essay exam and a set of property law multiple choice questions. GPT4 did not perform well on either one. GPT4 displayed an inability to reliably identify legal issues in the essay exam fact patterns without prompting, and answered only 54 percent of the multiple-choice questions correctly. We argue that GPT4's relative success on the UBE was due to the structure of bar exam questions, which provide internal prompts that aided GPT4's performance. We therefore argue that GPT4's ability to pass the UBE indicates more about the structure of bar exam questions than it does about its ability to do fundamental legal academic tasks, such as issue spotting. In late August 2025, we ran the same property essay and multiple-choice questions through the recently released GPT5. GPT5 displayed a marked performance improvement over GPT4. It was able to spot legal issues from fact patterns without prompting, though in one instance, it made a fundamental error the second time it answered a problem. It answered 94 percent of the multiple-choice questions correctly, comparing favorably to the 54 percent that GPT4 answered correctly. How the Billable Hour Can Survive Generative Al Jonah E. Perlin 42 The legal profession is rapidly adopting generative artificial intelligence (Al) technology. As a result, there is an increasingly common assumption that lawyers will decrease their longstanding reliance on the billable hour. The logic underlying this conclusion seems intuitive: if Al reduces the time lawyers spend on certain tasks while eliminating others altogether, then the total number of billable hours will fall. That decline, in turn, could threaten the financial viability of hourly billing, despite its place as the dominant law firm compensation model over the past half century. This Article challenges the inevitability of this assumption. It argues instead that the billable hour not only has a viable path to survive in the age of Al, it may well thrive as a result. The argument proceeds in three parts. First, it explains why-despite decades of criticism-the longstanding structural justifications for the hourly billing model are sufficiently sticky to help the hourly billing model remain relevant even in an AI-enhanced legal profession. Second, it introduces the CHRGE Equation (Compensation = Hours x Rate - Granted Reductions - Expenses), a simple but novel framework for understanding how law firms generate revenue under the billable hour model. Because hours worked are only one part of this equation, assessing the billable hour's long-term viability requires analyzing how generative Al is likely to affect each of the five variables. Third, by looking at how generative Al is likely to affect each of the CHRGE variables, the Article shows why generative Al is unlikely to drastically diminish billable time across the profession and, even if it does, how generative Al adoption may improve the other CHRGE variables in ways that can offset this decrease in billable hours. To be clear, this Article is not a normative defense of the billable hour. Its contribution is instead descriptive and structural. It makes the case that, for both institutional and compensation-based reasons, it is far from inevitable that generative Al will render time-based billing obsolete. * The first four articles of this issue were solicited through Stetson Business Law Review's 2025 Symposium, which highlighted four main practice areas Al influences both academically and practically. We explored Al and its impact on Employment Law, Ethics, Intellectual Property, and In-House counsel. Our noteworthy speakers ranged from highly esteemed professors to successful practicing attorneys. As our keynote, we were honored to have Mr. Barry Jones, AUSA, from the Department of Justice's National Security and Cybercrime Division.