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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.

By The Draftiro team · Practice management· 6 min read·Published

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

  1. 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.
  2. 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."
  3. 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

Every AI exchange in Draftiro auto-creates a billable time entry, tagged "AI-assisted," with the matter pre-populated. You decide whether to bill it, write it off, or merge it with your review-time entry. The audit trail shows the entry was AI-originated, so a future bar review or fee dispute can see what happened.

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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