The Business of Law · Cyprus
Clients are starting to arrive with contracts they have already drafted using AI, and to expect a smaller bill for them. On a self-storage deal in Larnaca, reviewing one took three times longer than writing it from scratch would have. Neither side was being unreasonable.
The text of this article was generated using artificial intelligence, researched and checked against the primary sources listed at the end. Editorial responsibility for its publication rests with Philippos Aristotelous. Disclosed under Article 50(4) of the EU Artificial Intelligence Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689).
Clients have begun drafting their own agreements with AI and sending them in to be checked, expecting the bill to reflect the work they have already done.
It runs the other way. A document the firm did not draft costs more to trust than one it did, because there is no template to lean on and no clause you are entitled to skim.
The billing fight firms braced for — clients demanding AI discounts — has largely not arrived. Only 6 per cent report clients asking for a price reduction. The pressure came in a different form.
Fix it at intake, not on the invoice: charge for a twenty-minute triage, quote afterwards, and say out loud why checking costs more than writing.
1.The favour
In April, Petros Hadjimichael sent his lawyer a forty-page supply agreement for the self-storage units he is building outside Larnaca. He had written it himself over a weekend, with AI, and he was rather pleased with it. It had numbered clauses, defined terms, a schedule at the back. He attached it to an email with one line: “Christiana, most of the work is done here — can you just check it?”
Christiana Georgiou has acted for him for six years. She read that covering line the way any of us would, as a client trying to be helpful and save a little money, which is exactly what it was. She said she would look at it that week.
She sent the invoice five weeks later. Nineteen hours.
2.Why the review costs more than the draft
Had Petros simply asked her to draft the agreement, Christiana would have started from the firm’s own supply template, which she has used perhaps thirty times and trusts. Six hours, near enough, and most of that spent on the two or three clauses that were genuinely particular to his site.
What she had instead was forty pages of fluent English she had never seen before and could not vouch for. There is no template to lean on when the document arrived from outside, and there is no clause you are entitled to skim. So she read all of it, properly, and the reading turned up the sort of thing that reads perfectly well until you check it: an arbitration clause pointing at a body with no jurisdiction over a Cyprus supply contract, a limitation of liability in clause 12 that clause 31 quietly contradicted, and defined terms used twice in senses that did not match.
The same agreement, arrived at two ways. The review was not a discount on the drafting; it was a longer piece of work.
None of that is exotic. The model had produced a competent English-law-shaped document, and Petros had no way of knowing that is what he was reading. But every one of those points had to be found, checked, and then explained to a client who believed the work was already done — and explaining is its own hour.
A document you did not draft costs more to trust than one you did, because nothing in it can be assumed.
3.The discount that never came
Ask a room of partners about AI and billing and they will tell you the fight is coming over price: clients will work out that the drafting is faster and demand to pay less for it.
The evidence so far says otherwise. In the 8am 2026 Legal Industry Report, which surveyed more than 1,300 legal professionals, 47 per cent thought AI could affect their billing practices — but only 6 per cent said clients were asking for AI-related price reductions, and only 3 per cent said clients frequently asked them to demonstrate AI-driven efficiency.
Firms are braced for a conversation their clients are mostly not having.
So the discount conversation has largely not happened. What is happening instead is quieter and costs more: the client does part of the work himself, sends it in, and expects the bill to reflect that. The pressure on the fee is real. It just did not arrive in the form anyone was watching for.
4.What to say on Monday
Christiana’s fee was justified and she still had an awkward call, because the number arrived five weeks after the expectation had been set. The fix is not a better invoice. It is twenty minutes at the start.
Triage before you quote. Twenty minutes with a client-supplied draft will tell you whether it is sound, salvageable, or quicker to replace. Charge for that twenty minutes, and quote the rest afterwards.
Say the sentence out loud. “A document I did not draft takes longer to check than one I did, because I have to verify every line rather than rely on a precedent I know.” Clients accept this readily when they hear it in week one. In week five it sounds like an excuse.
Offer the alternative and let them choose. Petros would probably have taken six hours of drafting over nineteen of review, had anyone put the two numbers next to each other. He never got the chance, because nobody thought to price the thing he had not asked for.
The instinct in the room is to treat a client’s AI draft as a favour that should reduce the fee. It is more useful to treat it as a different instruction — verification rather than drafting — and to price it as one.
5.Where the risk actually sits
There is a second question underneath the first, and it is the one that ought to worry a managing partner more: whose name is on the advice.
It is the firm’s. It does not matter that the words came from the client, or from a model, or from a weekend. Once Christiana returns the document with her comments, the firm has taken a position on it, and it will be judged on that position.
Firms are already handling AI-drafted material — their clients’, if not their own — without having decided what they think about it.
Which makes the governance figures in the same report uncomfortable reading. Forty-three per cent of firms have no formal policy on AI use and no plans to write one; fifty-four per cent provide no training on responsible use and no plans to start.
That decision is cheap to make now and expensive to make in a complaint.
- When a client sends in a draft they prepared themselves, who decides how it is priced — and do they decide before the work starts?
- Could any fee earner here explain, in one sentence a client would accept, why reviewing costs more than drafting?
- If a document your firm reviewed but did not write turned out to be wrong, what would your file show about the basis on which you approved it?
- Do you have a written position on client-supplied AI material, or is each fee earner deciding case by case?
Deciding what your firm charges for this
A conversation about pricing, scoping and the work arriving through the door.
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