Florida joins New York, adopting its own AI rule | Legal Loop

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Last week, I discussed the New York State Unified Court System’s new generative artificial intelligence (AI) rule, Part 161. This rule requires that lawyers and parties who appear before New York Courts and plan to use AI must: 1) understand its capabilities and limitations, and 2) ensure that all submissions are accurate and devoid of citations to fictitious legal authority.

New York is not the only state amending its rules to incorporate AI-specific requirements. For example, in May, the Supreme Court of Florida also revised its rules to provide additional guidance for all document signers who submit papers to Florida Courts. (Online: https://www.lawnext.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Opinion_SC2026-0673.pdf).

The amendments became effective June 15, 2026. However, because the amendments had not been previously published for comment, a 75-day window beginning on May 28th was established to allow interested parties the opportunity to file comments with the Court.

The Court explained that while AI tools “can be helpful, they also can generate content that appears plausible but is in fact inaccurate, including fabricated or “hallucinated” authorities.” The primary reason cited for adopting these amendments was “to create a statewide, uniform replacement for varied circuit court administrative orders imposing disclosure and certification requirements about the use of artificial intelligence in filings.”

The updated rule requires document signers to represent that they have read the document, there are good grounds to support it, it wasn’t filed to delay the proceeding, and “the legal authorities identified exist and are accurately cited.”

If you ask me, it feels a bit surreal to see the words in the preceding sentence on paper. Shouldn’t that go without saying? Of course lawyers should rely on real and existing authority to support their arguments! That the Florida Supreme Court amended its rules to include that verbiage borders on absurd.

Don’t get me wrong. I agree that the exponential surge in hallucinated case citations in legal briefs is a problem. But I would argue it’s not a technology problem; it’s a competency problem.

Hear me out.

This is not a new phenomenon. Legal briefs have long included incorrect case citations, mistaken representations of the law, and misattributed or inaccurate quotations.

However, before AI, lawyers were given the benefit of the doubt when there were errors in briefs. There was an underlying assumption that the document drafter had read the supporting case law and crafted a thoughtful, substantiated legal argument. For that reason, these issues were often written off as scrivener’s errors or simple mistakes.

It happens to the best of us; no one’s perfect.

That being said, there are basic competency requirements that we, as attorneys, are required to meet. Reading court submissions and ensuring their accuracy before signing the verification is lawyering 101.

Attorneys should have been doing this all along. Anything else amounts to professional misconduct and arguable legal malpractice. It is our job to provide accurate legal advice and to diligently represent our clients’ interests, both in and out of court.

Just because courts are faced with a tsunami of verifiably inaccurate filings doesn’t mean we need new rules. Instead of passing redundant regulations, we should continue to educate the profession about the risks of AI and continue to penalize practitioners for negligent lawyering.

I’ll die on this hill: the new rules are unnecessary, and we should stop blaming the technology. This is a basic competency problem, and the current rules of professional conduct are more than sufficient.

Nicole Black is a Rochester, New York attorney, author, journalist, and Principal Legal Insight Strategist at 8am, the team behind MyCase, LawPay, CasePeer, and DocketWise.She is the nationally-recognized author of “Cloud Computing for Lawyers” (2012) and co-authors “Social Media for Lawyers: The Next Frontier” (2010), both published by the American Bar Association. She also co-authors “Criminal Law in New York,” a Thomson Reuters treatise. She writes regular columns for Above the Law, ABA Journal, and The Daily Record, has authored hundreds of articles for other publications, and regularly speaks at conferences regarding the intersection of law and emerging technologies. She is an ABA Legal Rebel, and is listed on the Fastcase 50 and ABA LTRC Women in Legal Tech. She can be contacted at [email protected].