The pitch for legal AI is always "save hours." The useful question is: how many, on what, and how do you measure it without fooling yourself? Here's a grounded way to think about ROI for a solo or small firm — and the billing rule you must not break while chasing it.

Where the time actually goes

For most solo practices, the biggest time sinks are repetitive drafting (demand letters, discovery, routine motions), document synthesis (turning records into a chronology), and deadline math. Those are exactly where AI compresses hours — not in the judgment-heavy strategy work, which it shouldn't touch anyway.

A simple, defensible ROI estimate

Pick your three most repetitive document types. Estimate the hours each currently takes you, from blank page to filed.
Track the AI-assisted version honestly. Log the time the AI took plus your review time. The gap is your saved time — for that document.
Multiply by volume. Saved hours per document × documents per month = monthly hours recovered. Compare that against the tool's monthly cost at your effective hourly rate.

If a tool costs $89/mo and recovers even three hours a month at a $200 effective rate, the math is not close. But measure your real numbers — don't take the vendor's.

The billing rule you can't skip

Saving time does not mean you bill the time you saved. ABA Formal Opinion 512 is explicit: charge for the time you actually spend, not the hours the AI hid. If a brief took the AI two minutes and you ninety minutes to review and finalize, you bill the time you spent — not the seven hours it used to take. Keeping AI-assisted time entries separate and tagged keeps that defensible.

How Draftiro makes ROI visible

Every AI exchange in Draftiro auto-creates a billable time entry tagged "AI-assisted," so your audit trail shows what the AI did and what you reviewed. That's the raw data for an honest ROI conversation with yourself — and for an honest bill to your client. See how it fits a PI or family-law practice, or start on the free plan.