AI work billed as AI work.
Time captured at the task, narratives drafted from the audit log — and agent work on its own line, never as an attorney hour.
What stays true no matter which model runs.
AI time is not attorney time
Agent work is a distinct line with a distinct basis. The platform will not aggregate the two.
Narratives from the record
What was done is drafted from the log of what was actually done, then edited by the person billing it.
Client rules at entry
No block billing, required subjects, daily caps, increments — enforced as the entry is written.
Every line traces back
An invoice line resolves to entries in the audit trail. The answer to “what was this for” is a record.
Where the money is
Budget and capacity, on the matter itself.
Caps, work in progress, overdue invoices and utilisation sit beside the matter rather than in a system the fee earner never opens. The person who can act on a cap is the person who can see it.
- Cap and consumption shown on the matter
- Human and agent leverage reported apart
- Pre-bill assembled from the record
Captured where it happens
Time logged at the task, not from memory.
Work is recorded against the gate, the draft or the review that produced it, so a fortnight later nobody is reconstructing a day from a calendar.
- Recorded as the work is done
- Attributed to the matter and the actor
- No entry can be recorded twice
Separation
The line item a client is entitled to see.
Drafting, cite-checking, chronology extraction — each appears as an AI task against its matter, attributed to the agent that ran it.
Client rules
Outside counsel guidelines, applied where they are cheap to fix.
A failure caught at pre-bill is expensive; the same failure prevented at entry is free.
Pre-bill
Partner review with the exceptions already listed.
Open compliance flags are visible continuously rather than discovered at month end.
A clause is the usual answer. Ours is a clause and an architecture.
On every tier. The matter boundary, the approval gate and the signed record are enforced in the runtime — hosted, in your own infrastructure, or on Bernio Pro.
- ABA Model Rule 1.5(a)US
A lawyer shall not charge or collect an unreasonable fee or an unreasonable amount for expenses.
Agent work is separated from attorney time at capture, so the basis of every charge is explicit on the face of the record.
- ABA Formal Opinion 93-379US
A lawyer may not bill more time than was spent, bill two clients for the same hour, or charge overhead as professional time.
Time is captured against the task as it happens and cannot be recorded twice; agent compute is billed as a task, not as professional time.
- GDPR Art. 30EU
Controllers and processors must maintain a record of processing activities and produce it on request.
The same append-only log that produces the billing narrative is the record of what was processed, by which agent.
Run a month of your own time through it.
We take a closed matter, capture it the way Bernio would, and put the pre-bill next to the one you sent.
Development status
Bernio is in active development with design partners — firms running real matters through the platform and shaping what is built next — and the first commercial contracts are being signed on founding terms. The capabilities described on this page are built and can be demonstrated on a matter type your team handles. Bernio Pro — the on-premise appliance — is an engineering prototype and is not yet commercially available, so any capability on this site that depends on it is marked as such. Descriptions of the product are not warranties; the binding terms for any deployment are those set out in the applicable written agreement.