How do states actually define the unauthorized practice of law?
Mostly through the state supreme court rather than the legislature, and mostly in terms of exercising legal judgment for another person rather than in terms of specific acts. Colorado is a useful worked example because its rules are unusually explicit: under C.R.C.P. 232.2(b) the practice of law includes protecting, defending or enforcing the legal rights or duties of another person; representing another before a tribunal or drafting pleadings for a proceeding; counseling, advising or assisting another in connection with that person’s legal rights or duties; and exercising legal judgment in preparing legal documents for another person.
The authority behind that rule is judicial. In Unauthorized Practice of Law Committee v. Prog, 761 P.2d 1111, 1115 (Colo. 1988), the Colorado Supreme Court described its exclusive authority under the state constitution to regulate and control the practice of law, and in Denver Bar Association v. Public Utilities Commission, 391 P.2d 467, 471 (Colo. 1964), it framed the practice of law as acting in a representative capacity in protecting, enforcing or defending another’s legal rights and in counseling and assisting them in connection with those rights.
Two consequences follow for anyone reasoning about software. The definitions turn on judgment rather than on who or what performs the act, which is why they reach products at all. And they are state-specific, so a conclusion drawn in one jurisdiction transfers to another only as an argument. This piece describes what particular authorities have said and when; it is not advice about any state’s requirements.
Has a court ever held that document-generation software crossed the line?
Once, on appeal, and the reasoning is about the software making legal choices rather than recording the user’s. In In re Reynoso, 477 F.3d 1117 (9th Cir., 27 February 2007), the Ninth Circuit affirmed a finding that Frankfort Digital Services engaged in the unauthorized practice of law through software that generated completed bankruptcy petitions and schedules from information users typed into web forms. The court’s point was that the software “did, indeed, go far beyond providing clerical services”: it “determined where (particularly, in which schedule) to place information provided by the debtor, selected exemptions for the debtor and supplied relevant legal citations.” It also weighed what the service claimed for itself, that it “touted its offering of legal advice and projected an aura of expertise.” It cited In re Kaitangian, 218 B.R. 102 (Bankr. S.D. Cal. 1998), for the principle that advising on available exemptions, or choosing one, requires the exercise of legal judgment.
The earlier case is Unauthorized Practice of Law Committee v. Parsons Technology, Inc. The district court in the Northern District of Texas enjoined the sale of Quicken Family Lawyer in Texas. Before the appeal was decided, the Texas legislature passed House Bill 1507 adding Tex. Gov’t Code § 81.101(c), which excludes from the practice of law the design, creation, publication, distribution, display or sale of computer software and similar products if the products clearly and conspicuously state that they are not a substitute for the advice of an attorney. On 29 June 1999 the Fifth Circuit vacated the judgment and injunction and remanded, at 179 F.3d 956.
The third case usually cited is Janson v. LegalZoom.com, Inc., 802 F. Supp. 2d 1053 (W.D. Mo. 2011), decided by Judge Nanette K. Laughrey on 2 August 2011 in No. 2:10-cv-04018-NKL, and it decided less than it is often said to. The order granted LegalZoom summary judgment on the claims relating to patent and trademark applications, on federal preemption grounds, and denied its motion in all other respects; it also granted the plaintiffs partial summary judgment on one narrow question, whether the documents affect or relate to secular rights under Missouri Revised Statutes section 484.010.2. The question the court answered was “whether a reasonable juror could conclude that LegalZoom did engage in the unauthorized practice of law,” not whether it had. No trial followed: the court granted final approval to a settlement and dismissed the case with prejudice on 30 April 2012, so there is no judgment and no appellate ruling.
What changes when the tool answers questions instead of filling in a template?
The user’s own choice, which is the thing the software exemptions were built to protect, becomes much harder to locate. Tex. Gov’t Code § 81.101(c) removes disclaimed software from the chapter’s definition of the practice of law, on the implicit model of a product that presents forms and instructions and leaves the selection to the person. The exemption is narrower than it is usually described: it operates “[i]n this chapter,” § 81.101(b) keeps the judicial branch’s power to decide that other acts constitute the practice of law, and subsection (c) says on its face that it “does not authorize the use of the products or similar media in violation of Chapter 83.” A conversational system that is asked whether a revocable trust or a transfer-on-death deed suits a particular family, and answers, has done the selecting. Whether the Texas exemption covers that is an open question, not a settled one.
Janson v. LegalZoom.com, Inc. is the case most often read backward on this point. The court said in terms that “LegalZoom’s sale of blank forms over the internet does not constitute the unauthorized practice of law” and that its service “goes beyond self-help because of the role played by its human employees, not because of the internet medium” — the employees who reviewed each customer’s data file and each finished document. It added that the branching program was itself written by an employee applying Missouri law, so that “[i]t is that human input that creates the legal document.” A system with no employee in the loop is a different fact pattern from the one Judge Laughrey had in front of her, in either direction.
Colorado has language that appears to reach it. In a letter dated 18 January 2024 asking the Colorado Supreme Court to review the UPL rules, the Colorado Access to Justice Commission quoted C.R.C.P. 232.2(c)(9), under which unauthorized practice by a nonlawyer includes owning or controlling a website, application, software, bot or other technology that interactively offers or provides services involving the exercise of legal judgment. The Commission’s concern was the opposite of a crackdown: it warned that the UPL rules “may block the adoption of new technologies in Colorado for use in the legal system.”
That the question is live rather than answered is documented by the regulators themselves. Writing in Colorado Lawyer in December 2024, Colorado Supreme Court Justice Maria E. Berkenkotter and Colorado Court of Appeals Judge Lino S. Lipinsky de Orlov recorded that no published Colorado case addressed the intersection between the UPL rules and generative AI, that the Colorado Supreme Court had asked its Advisory Committee on the Practice of Law in July 2023 to consider AI-related amendments, and that a subcommittee’s work was continuing. The Institute’s plan drafting and document review area covers the attorney-side version of this split.
Where has enforcement against AI legal services actually landed?
On consumer-protection law rather than on unauthorized practice, at least where it has reached an outcome. The Federal Trade Commission issued an administrative complaint against DoNotPay, alongside a proposed consent order, in September 2024, alleging that the company misrepresented an AI chatbot as a substitute for a licensed attorney and had not adequately tested the quality and accuracy of the legal documents and advice it produced. The Commission announced the final order, Docket No. C-4812, on 11 February 2025. It requires DoNotPay to pay $193,000, to identify and notify all new subscribers between 1 January 2021 and 31 December 2023, and bars it from representing that the service operates like a human lawyer or any other professional unless the claim is not misleading and is backed by competent and reliable evidence.
The one private suit of this kind that produced a reported ruling never reached the question. In MillerKing, LLC v. DoNotPay, Inc., No. 3:23-cv-00863-NJR (S.D. Ill.), an Illinois law firm filed a putative class action on 15 March 2023 on behalf of all US law firms, pleading false association and false advertising under the Lanham Act, a claim under the Illinois Uniform Deceptive Trade Practices Act, and a fourth count for the unauthorized practice of law under the Illinois Attorney Act, 705 ILCS 205/1, and the Corporation Practice of Law Prohibition Act. On 17 November 2023 the court granted the motion to dismiss for lack of Article III standing, holding that the firm “has not plausibly alleged that it has suffered a diversion of clients or reputational harm,” and dismissed without prejudice with leave to amend by 18 December 2023. No amended complaint was filed, and the clerk entered judgment dismissing the entire action without prejudice on 4 January 2024. Nobody has ruled on whether DoNotPay practiced law.
One unauthorized-practice claim against a generative system is live and undecided. Nippon Life Insurance Company of America v. OpenAI Foundation, No. 1:26-cv-02448 (N.D. Ill.), filed 4 March 2026, pleads three counts under Illinois law — tortious interference with a contract, abuse of process, and the unlicensed practice of law under the Illinois Attorney Act, 705 ILCS 205/1 — and seeks $300,000 in compensatory damages, $10 million in punitive damages, and injunctions barring OpenAI from practicing law in Illinois. The complaint alleges that “ChatGPT is not licensed to practice law in Illinois.” OpenAI moved to dismiss on 15 May 2026, arguing that “ChatGPT is not a lawyer and it does not practice law.{R} The docket shows the motion still under advisement as of 4 August 2026, with no ruling and no published opinion, so nothing has been decided either way and nothing here should be read as a prediction of what will be.
The older authority on selling legal services without a license still holds. In The Florida Bar v. TIKD Services LLC, 326 So. 3d 1073 (Fla. 2021), decided 14 October 2021, the Florida Supreme Court disapproved the referee’s recommendation, concluded that a company offering traffic-ticket resolution through contracted attorneys was engaged in the unauthorized practice of law, and permanently enjoined it. The court divided four to three, with Justice Couriel dissenting joined by two colleagues, and the referee had recommended dismissal, so this is a contested line even on facts involving no software at all. Searches of these sources on 15 September 2026 turned up no reported US decision applying a state UPL rule to a generative system that drafts an estate planning instrument; that is the result of a search, not a proof that none exists.
What does a supervising lawyer’s own use of AI to draft actually require?
That the lawyer treat the output as work the lawyer produced, which is the one part of this subject where the guidance is consistent across sources. ABA Formal Opinion 512, issued 29 July 2024 by the ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility, addresses generative AI under the duties of competence, protection of client information, communication with clients, supervision of employees and agents, advancing only meritorious claims and contentions, candor toward the tribunal, and charging reasonable fees. It states that managerial lawyers must establish clear policies regarding the law firm’s permissible use of generative AI and that supervisory lawyers must make reasonable efforts to ensure the firm’s lawyers and nonlawyers comply with their professional obligations when using those tools.
Florida Bar Ethics Opinion 24-1, issued 19 January 2024, is more specific about the boundary. It notes that Rule 4-5.3(a) defines a nonlawyer assistant as a person, then applies the standards anyway, and says that a lawyer may not delegate to generative AI any act that could constitute the practice of law such as the negotiation of claims or any other function that requires a lawyer’s personal judgment and participation. It also says that the fact a generative AI is managed and operated by a third party does not obviate the need to ensure its actions are consistent with the lawyer’s own obligations.
Colorado has since written this into its conduct rules. The Colorado Supreme Court approved AI-related amendments on 8 January 2026, effective the same date, adding a new Scope section [20A] providing that a lawyer who uses, directly or indirectly, technology in performing or delivering legal services may be held accountable for a resulting violation of the rules, and a new Comment [9] to Rule 1.1 stating that reliance on technology does not diminish the lawyer’s duty to exercise independent judgment in the representation of a client. Conduct rules are adopted state by state and diverge; see the Institute’s supervision and bar guidance areas, and how often legal AI still gets it wrong for the verification load this implies.
What can software not do for an estate planning client, whatever the UPL answer is?
Complete the execution, which is where a plan most often fails for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the drafting. Electronic execution is possible in a minority of states and on specific terms. The Uniform Law Commission’s own enactment tracker for the Uniform Electronic Wills Act listed eleven jurisdictions as of September 2026: Utah (2020), Colorado, North Dakota and Washington (2021), the US Virgin Islands (2022), the District of Columbia, Idaho and Minnesota (2023, Minnesota recorded as substantially similar), Oklahoma (2024), Missouri (2025) and Kentucky (2026). Under section 5(a) of the uniform act an electronic will must be “a record that is readable as text at the time of signing,” signed by the testator or by another in the testator’s name at the testator’s direction and in the testator’s physical presence, and signed by at least two witnesses — with the enacting state choosing whether those witnesses must be in the testator’s physical presence or may appear electronically, and with a bracketed alternative under which a notarized will needs no witnesses at all. The uniform act does not require a tamper-evident electronic record; that is a feature of some non-uniform statutes, such as Indiana’s.
A separate group of states legislated on their own terms rather than adopting the uniform act, among them Nevada (Nev. Rev. Stat. 133.085, the earliest of them), Indiana (Ind. Code 29-1-21), Arizona (Ariz. Rev. Stat. 14-2518), Florida (Fla. Stat. 732.521 to 732.525), Illinois (755 ILCS 6, now the Electronic Wills, Electronic Estate Planning Documents, and Remote Witnesses Act) and Maryland (Md. Code, Est. & Trusts 4-102). Washington belongs on the uniform list rather than this one: RCW 11.12.400 says the provisions {L}may be known and cited as the uniform electronic wills act,” though its enactment adds non-uniform qualified-custodian sections. The practical consequence is that the formalities a plan has to satisfy are a function of the client’s state and sometimes of the client’s location at signing, and a drafting tool that produces an excellent instrument has still not produced a valid one.
The judgments that generate the litigation are also outside the tool. Capacity and undue influence are assessed by a person who was in the room, and they are contested after the client has died and cannot be asked. No decision on the validity of a will drafted by a generative AI system surfaced in the searches behind this piece, which means firms are reasoning from the document-assembly cases and from first principles rather than from authority on point. The Institute’s advisor disruption area covers the parallel pressure from platforms sold to financial advisors, and whether a consumer chatbot conversation is privileged covers what happens to what a client typed into one.