Can My Lawyer Use AI? What It Does, What It Cannot Do, and What to Ask

What AI is actually good at in legal work

The useful applications are unglamorous and mostly about volume. A software system can read ten thousand pages of medical records or a decade of emails in minutes and tell you where a particular date, name, or phrase appears, which is work that used to consume weeks and still missed things. It can produce a first draft of a document whose structure is already known, summarize a long deposition well enough to tell you which forty pages you need to read, and organize a discovery production into something searchable. It can also check a sixty-page agreement for internal contradictions, defined terms used before they are defined, and cross-references pointing at the wrong section, which is exactly the sort of error a tired human reader skates past.

What all of those have in common is that the output is checkable. Somebody can look at the original and confirm the answer, which is the only condition under which this technology belongs anywhere near a legal matter.

What AI cannot do

Two failures here are categorical rather than incidental, and the first one is the reason this page exists. A language model does not know whether a case exists. It produces text that resembles the text it was trained on, and a citation that looks exactly like a real citation is, from the model’s point of view, a success. It has no mechanism for distinguishing a real one from a plausible invention.

Beyond that, a language model does not exercise judgment. Deciding which of four arguments to lead with, which weakness to disclose and which to leave alone, whether a given judge will react badly to a particular tone, whether a client should settle at a number that is objectively low but subjectively right for their life, none of that is a text-generation problem. Strategy is the lawyer’s work. So is accountability, because a filing carries a signature, and no software can be the person who stands up and answers for it.

The fabricated citation problem, named plainly

This is the failure that has produced actual discipline, and it is worth understanding rather than glossing over. In 2023 a federal judge in the Southern District of New York sanctioned lawyers who filed a brief relying on judicial decisions that did not exist, generated by a general-purpose AI chatbot. The court’s language in that case has been quoted repeatedly since: “A fake opinion is not ‘existing law’ and citation to a fake opinion does not provide a non-frivolous ground for extending, modifying, or reversing existing law, or for establishing new law. An attempt to persuade a court or oppose an adversary by relying on fake opinions is an abuse of the adversary system.”

A year later, the Second Circuit addressed the same conduct. There, an attorney admitted citing a nonexistent state court decision in a reply brief after a chatbot suggested it, and acknowledged she had not read or otherwise confirmed the decision. The court referred her to its Grievance Panel and stated the obligation in one sentence: “At the very least, the duties imposed by Rule 11 require that attorneys read, and thereby confirm the existence and validity of, the legal authorities on which they rely.” The court added that no new rule about AI was necessary to tell a licensed attorney that her submissions must be accurate.

Neither court said the technology is forbidden. Both said the person signing the document is responsible for verifying it, which has always been true. The defense against a fabricated citation is reading the actual source, and that is a human obligation that does not get delegated anywhere. Washington’s Rules of Professional Conduct point the same direction. RPC 3.3(a)(1) provides that a lawyer shall not knowingly make a false statement of fact or law to a tribunal, and a citation to an opinion that does not exist is a false statement of law whether or not the lawyer meant it.

What happens to your confidential information

Clients should ask this more often than they do, because the answer varies enormously between offices. When a lawyer puts your facts into a software tool, those facts leave the office. Where they go, who can read them, whether they are retained, and whether they are used to train anything are all determined by the contract behind that tool, and plenty of lawyers have never read it. Washington RPC 1.6(a) prohibits revealing information relating to the representation without informed consent, and RPC 1.6(c) requires a lawyer to “make reasonable efforts to prevent the inadvertent or unauthorized disclosure of, or unauthorized access to, information relating to the representation of a client.” A free consumer chatbot with terms permitting the provider to use submitted content is a poor fit for that obligation.

Along the same lines, the competence rule reaches this. Comment 8 to Washington RPC 1.1 says a lawyer should keep abreast of changes in the law and its practice “including the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology.” Understanding where your file goes is part of the job rather than an optional extra.

The lawyer signs it, so the lawyer owns it

There is no AI-related excuse available to the person who signs a filing. Washington RPC 5.3 makes a lawyer responsible for making reasonable efforts to ensure that the conduct of nonlawyer assistance is compatible with the lawyer’s own professional obligations, and responsible outright for conduct the lawyer orders or ratifies. Whatever a tool produces becomes the lawyer’s work product the moment it is adopted, and it carries the lawyer’s name, the lawyer’s judgment, and the lawyer’s exposure.

In practice that means every proposition in a document I file traces to a source I actually opened and read, rather than to a source a system told me about.

How AI should show up on your bill

If a tool makes a task faster, the client should see that. The ABA Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility addressed generative AI in Formal Opinion 512 (2024), which works through the lawyer’s obligations on competence, confidentiality, candor to the tribunal, supervision, client communication, and fees. The fee point is the one clients care about: efficiency gained by a tool is not a basis for billing as though the slower method were still in use.

Correspondingly, Washington RPC 1.5(a) says a lawyer shall not make an agreement for, charge, or collect an unreasonable fee, and the first listed factor in the reasonableness analysis is the time and labor required. A lawyer who spends ninety seconds on something and bills two hours is not describing the time and labor required. Honest timekeeping is the whole answer here, and it is not complicated.

Four questions worth asking any lawyer

Do you use AI in your practice, and for what? A confident lawyer will give you a specific answer. Vagueness or offense is itself informative.

Where does my information go, and what do the terms of that tool permit the provider to do with it? The lawyer should know, and should be able to tell you in plain words.

How do you verify legal citations before a document is filed? The right answer describes a process of reading the source, not a statement of trust in a tool.

If a tool saves you time, how does that appear on my invoice? You are entitled to ask, and the answer tells you most of what you need to know about how the office handles money.

How I use it

I run an AI-assisted practice and I am direct about it, because the alternative is pretending otherwise. Software helps me read large record sets, organize discovery, produce first drafts, and check long documents for internal inconsistency. Every citation in anything I file is verified against the actual authority before it goes out, and the legal arguments and the strategy behind them are mine and are checked the same way, every document is reviewed and revised by me, and the strategic decisions in your matter are mine. The tooling makes me faster at the mechanical parts, and it does not form the theory of your case.

About my practice

I am Justin D. Leigh, an independent attorney with an office in downtown Spokane. My practice covers civil litigation, employment and civil rights claims, real estate and land use, business and regulatory work including alcohol beverage licensing, estate planning and probate, and family law, and I appear in superior courts across Washington, most often in Spokane, Klickitat, Kittitas, Benton, Franklin and Yakima counties. I am admitted in Washington (WSBA #55307) and Oregon (OSB #242384).

The reason I am willing to write this page is that the value of a lawyer was never the typing. It is knowing which facts matter, which argument to make, what a particular courtroom will do with it, and when to tell a client something they do not want to hear. No tool does any of that.

If you want to talk

I offer a free initial consultation by appointment at my downtown Spokane office. Questions about how a lawyer handles your information are reasonable to ask before you hire anyone, including me, and I would rather answer them early than have you wonder.

Disclaimer

This article is general information about Washington law, not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Law changes, and how it applies depends on facts specific to your situation. If you have a question about your own circumstances, speak with a lawyer.