Three separate bodies of rules now govern a lawyer using AI, and they are moving at different speeds in different directions.
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A lawyer using AI is now governed by three things at once, and they are not synchronised. Professional conduct authorities have issued guidance — the ABA in July 2024, and a growing number of state and city bars since, not uniformly. Courts have responded through standing orders, sanctions and a small number of published decisions, largely through existing certification rules rather than new ones. And a third body of law, aimed at AI generally rather than at lawyers, arrives on the desk as a client question. The practical problem is not finding this material. It is that almost every summary of it is undated, and an undated summary of a field that moves monthly is worse than none — it reads as current and is not. Everything in this area carries the date of the thing it describes.
What the bars have said, what the courts have done, and what clients are asking about.
What conduct authorities have published, when, and where they disagree with each other.
investigateWhat judges have required, what has actually been sanctioned, and the pattern in how courts respond.
investigateThe regulation aimed at AI systems generally, which arrives on your desk as a client question.
investigateHow the Institute tracks this — dating, sourcing, and refusing to smooth over disagreement.
No. The ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility issued Formal Opinion 512 on 29 July 2024, addressing competence, confidentiality, communication, candour, supervision and fees. It is persuasive, not binding — the ABA does not regulate lawyers. Conduct rules are adopted state by state, and a substantial number of state and city bars have since issued their own guidance which does not agree in every respect. Read your own jurisdiction. Where a firm practises in several, read all of them, because the strictest one tends to govern the firm's operating standard in practice.
Some do, many do not, and the requirement lives at the level of the individual judge far more often than the district. Standing orders proliferated from 2023 onward and range from disclosure of any generative AI use to a certification that citations were human-verified, with a small minority prohibiting AI outright. The Fifth Circuit proposed a circuit-wide certification requirement in November 2023 and declined to adopt it in June 2024, reasoning that existing accuracy rules already covered it. The operational consequence is unglamorous: checking the assigned judge's standing order belongs in the filing checklist, not in a policy document.
The reported outcomes have escalated. The first widely-reported US sanction, in June 2023, was $5,000 jointly. Since then reported outcomes have included five-figure sanctions against firms, removal from cases, referrals to state bar authorities, and — reported in April 2026 — an indefinite suspension. A researcher-maintained database has tracked cases worldwide where courts addressed fabricated AI citations, and the count has risen steeply rather than levelling off. Two features of the record matter more than the numbers: courts have treated the duty to verify as non-delegable, and several decisions turned as much on what happened after the error was discovered as on the error itself.
Because it is the part of AI practice with a shelf life measured in weeks, and because the three bodies of rules are usually conflated. Guidance from a bar about a lawyer's conduct, an order from a judge about filings, and a statute regulating AI systems generally are different instruments with different consequences, and a firm that treats them as one thing will over-comply in one direction and miss an obligation in another. Keeping them separate, and dating each, is the only way the material stays usable.
Describe your jurisdictions and how the firm uses AI today. The Institute will help you map it. Your own counsel decides what your rules require.