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How to bill AI-assisted work without crossing Op. 512
The clean approach to time tracking when AI does half the work — keeping your billing honest and your audit trail clean.
Formal Opinion 512's billing guidance is short: you can charge for the time you actually spend, not for the hours you saved. The opinion does not forbid billing for AI-assisted work; it forbids inflating the bill because the AI hid the savings.
The clean approach
- Track AI time separately. When AI drafts a brief, log the AI time as its own entry, tagged "AI-assisted." Log your review time as a separate, regular entry.
- Disclose in the engagement letter. "Some drafts in this matter may be AI-assisted; you will be billed for the time I spend reviewing and finalizing them."
- Don't pretend the AI is you. If you bill 4 hours for a brief that took the AI 2 minutes and you 90 minutes to review, you billed 4 hours of fictional work. That's the failure mode Op. 512 names.
How Draftiro automates this
For case-scoped AI work, Draftiro can create a draft time entry tagged "AI-assisted," with the matter pre-populated. The entry starts from the elapsed time of the AI exchange, which may not match the time you actually spent: review it, then mark it billed, or delete it and log your actual time as a manual entry. The app does not determine billing compliance.
This article was published by the Draftiro team and reviewed by our attorney advisors. See our team and how we track AI ethics opinions.
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