Clients are bringing AI drafts to negotiate your fee down. Fixing the draft usually costs more than starting clean.

The pressure now walks in the door already drafted. A solo attorney described the pattern to peers: he quoted a flat fee to resolve a real estate matter, the client ran the problem through AI, sent back bare-bones documents, and asked him to requote lower on the theory that the hard part was done. The documents would not have resolved her issue and might have created new ones. Owners in the same thread report the same thing happening often and expect it to keep growing. The client’s AI draft is not a work product. It is a negotiating position.

The math the client is proposing is backwards. Reviewing and correcting a flawed AI document routinely takes longer than drafting a clean one, because the lawyer has to find what is wrong before fixing it. Practitioners put it plainly: quote higher, not lower, because untangling the client’s AI draft is more work than starting fresh. So the client is asking for a discount on a matter that AI made more expensive to handle correctly, not less.

It is not only small clients doing this. Tim Robb, general counsel of World Insurance Associates, used a Bloomberg Law open letter to tell his longtime outside counsel that he expects to know when AI is used and expects pricing to reflect it, citing the professional-conduct rule that you cannot bill for time the work no longer takes. The pressure runs from the walk-in divorce client to the sophisticated GC, and it lands on the same nerve: the client believes the draft is the expensive part, and the draft is now cheap.

The profession’s reflex is defiance. Hold the quote, raise the rate, decline to work from the client’s document, fire the client. Those are the top answers every time the question comes up, and each of them protects a single invoice. None of them answers the structural question the client is actually asking, which is what they are paying a lawyer for now that a plausible-looking draft costs nothing.