The lawyers used AI. That wasn’t enough to cut their fee.

The winning side used AI. Why shouldn’t the losing side get a discount on the lawyers’ fees? The Tenth Circuit had a useful answer in Flux Drive v. Rong: show what was unreasonable about the hours. Pointing to the software did not do that work. The dispute was over fees awarded after a dismissal for lack of personal jurisdiction. It was not a client asking a lawyer to explain a private invoice. In its October 30 opinion the court upheld an initial $114,663.11 award challenged on the AI issue. It also upheld a separate supplemental award. The opinion describes time recorded in tenths of an hour, individual entries rather than blocks of undifferentiated tasks, and reductions where appropriate. The challengers did not show that the hours the lawyers actually spent were unreasonable. That record, not the mere fact of adopting technology, mattered. There are two protections here, and each side of a bill needs one. A lawyer paid by the hour cannot fairly charge for three hours of drafting that never happened. Equally, checking whether an AI tool invented a citation is work, even if generating the first draft took seconds. The ABA’s guidance on generative AI distinguishes actual time from time a lawyer hypothetically would have spent without the tool. Read together, the opinion and the guidance give clients a more useful question than “Did you use AI?” Ask what the lawyer did, why it needed doing, and what contemporaneous record supports the charge.