California’s New AI Rules Don’t Create New Duties. They Just Took Away Your Best Defense.
The State Bar’s proposed changes make clear that competence, confidentiality, candor, and supervision already apply to AI. The “the rules don’t mention it” defense is gone.
TL;DR: California’s State Bar has proposed AI amendments to six Rules of Professional Conduct. None of them are new duties. All of them make clear that competence, confidentiality, candor, and supervision already cover how your firm uses AI. Public comment closes August 6, 2026. The smart move is to get a written AI policy in place now, because one of the proposed rules turns that from a nice-to-have into a managerial expectation.
You saw the headlines. A lawyer files a brief. The cases look perfect. Clean citations, real-sounding holdings, the works. Except the cases don’t exist. The model made them up, nobody checked, and now there’s a sanctions order and a name in the press.
And you thought: not at my firm.
Here’s the thing. That instinct was right. It just didn’t have rules behind it yet. California is about to fix that.
What California actually proposed
On June 12, 2026, the State Bar’s ethics committee approved a second round of proposed AI amendments to the Rules of Professional Conduct. This traces back to a letter from the California Supreme Court in August 2025, directing the Bar to consider folding its 2023 generative AI guidance into the rules. The comment window closes August 6.
The changes touch six rules: competence, communication with clients, confidentiality, candor toward the tribunal, and the two supervision rules covering managing lawyers and nonlawyer staff.
One detail matters more than the rest. Every change lands in the comments, not the black-letter rules. The operative text doesn’t move an inch. Which tells you what this really is. Not a new AI rulebook. A statement that the duties you already carry apply to AI, full stop. The “the rules don’t mention AI” defense is going away. And that is the whole point.
Getting the facts right is now explicit
Start with the obvious one. The candor rule says verify your authorities before you file. No fabricated cases, no misquoted holdings, no cases pulled out of context, and that includes anything AI touched. Fine. Expected. You already knew that.
But the competence rule reaches further. The duty to verify follows the citation, not the courtroom. A fake case in a demand letter is the same violation as a fake case in a brief. Same for the memo to your client and the email to the other side. Anywhere a cited authority leaves your firm, someone had to confirm it was real. The hallucination problem was never just a courtroom problem.
Your AI tools just became a confidentiality test
This is the one with teeth.
Under the proposed comment, putting client confidential information into an AI system can count as revealing it, when there’s a substantial risk the information gets accessed, retained, or used in a way that breaks confidentiality. So the associate who pastes client facts into a consumer chatbot to summarize them might be making a disclosure, not saving an hour. The tool that trains on those facts is the exposure.
The test is whether that risk is substantial, judged against three things: whether the tool retains or trains on your data, the security around it, and whether anyone else can reach the information. It’s not a ban, and it doesn’t require zero retention. Most serious commercial tools hold your data about thirty days for abuse monitoring, then delete it. That window isn’t the problem. Training on your inputs is. So is data sitting where other users or third parties can get to it. A vetted enterprise tool that stays out of training, controls access, and purges on a schedule is fine. A free account someone signed up for last Tuesday, learning from every word typed into it, is not. That gap used to be an IT preference. Now it’s an ethics question.
When do you tell the client?
The communication rule adds something your partners will argue about. Your duty to keep clients informed now includes weighing whether to tell them you’re using AI on their matter.
It doesn’t order you to disclose AI use to every client on every file. People will read it that way, and they’ll be wrong. The rule asks you to make the call on purpose, against how new the tool is, the risks and benefits, the scope of the work, and how sophisticated the client is. A bank’s general counsel and a first-time divorce client are not the same conversation. The only wrong answer is not having made the call at all.
Supervision is a leadership problem now
This is where it gets close to home for firm leadership.
The managing-lawyer rule says you must make reasonable efforts to put internal policies in place governing AI use. In writing. The nonlawyer rule says your staff’s AI use is your responsibility to instruct and supervise. So the paralegal running a chatbot, the assistant using a tool you’ve never heard of, the contract reviewer who found something free online: that lands on the supervising lawyer. Not in theory. By name.
If your firm has no written policy and no idea what tools your people are using, this is the rule that should get your attention.
Yes, these are only comments
I can hear the pushback. These are just comments. They aren’t even final.
Both true. The comments don’t carry the same force as black-letter rules, and the proposal still has to clear public comment, the committee, the Board, and eventually the California Supreme Court before it binds anyone. So nothing here is enforceable tomorrow morning.
But that misses the point entirely. The underlying duties, competence, confidentiality, candor, supervision, are enforceable today. They always have been. The comments just take away your cover for pretending AI lives somewhere outside them. Waiting for the rule to pass is waiting for permission you already don’t have.
One more gap worth naming. The Supreme Court specifically asked about agentic AI, the tools that plan and act on their own with little human touch. These proposals mostly treat AI as general technology and don’t take on autonomous agents directly. The Bar put its agentic-AI thinking in the updated Practical Guidance instead. That’s where the harder questions are still being worked out. If you’re moving toward systems that draft and file with minimal human review, plan for that conversation too, not just this one.
What to do Monday morning
You don’t need a task force. You need three things done.
Write the policy and train your people to it. A short AI use policy people actually read beats a long one that sits in a drawer, and it should set your default for when you tell clients about AI use. Your nonlawyers need to know what they can use, what they can’t, and what never goes into a tool. The managing-lawyer rule is about to make all of this an expectation, so build it now while it’s still your idea.
Vet your tools before client data goes in. Check retention, training, and security, and get the answers in writing. If the vendor can’t explain in plain English what happens to your data, that’s your answer.
Verify every citation, wherever it’s headed. Court filings, client memos, letters to the other side. If AI touched it, a human confirms the authority exists and says what you claim it says.
And if you have a view on the rules themselves, you have until August 6 to say so. The comment form is open.
AI didn’t create new duties for your firm. It just made the old ones impossible to ignore.