California's new AI guidance says you can't bill for the time an AI saved you. Where do you land on this?

The California Bar just replaced its 2023 AI guidance, and this version covers "agentic AI" for the first time, tools that run whole workflows on their own. Drafting, discovery, intake, without you prompting each step. Worth a read if you haven't seen it.

Most of it is what you'd expect. You still have to read and verify everything. No filing with a citation you haven't personally checked. Don't put confidential client info into a tool without knowing where the data goes. Supervise it like you'd supervise a junior.

But one line is going to start arguments, and I'm genuinely curious where people here land.

The guidance says your fees have to reflect actual time and cost. So if an agent does in 10 minutes what used to take you 3 hours, you bill the 10 minutes, not the 3 hours, unless the client gives informed written consent to something else.

Here's the tension. The entire point of getting good at these tools is doing the work faster. But if faster just means you bill less for the same result, what's the incentive to invest in it? Then again, billing 3 hours for 10 minutes of work is exactly the kind of thing that earns the profession its reputation.

So genuinely, how are you thinking about this? Pass the savings to the client and compete on being faster and cheaper? Move to flat or value fees so the clock stops mattering? Or is the honest answer that most firms will quietly keep billing the old way until someone gets caught?

Curious how people are actually planning to handle it, because "bill for actual time" and "the tool makes you 10x faster" don't sit together easily.