Artificial Intelligence and the Law: What Competent Counsel Must Know Now
Abstract
From LLMs to liability, IP, contracts and global regulation: a competence primer for the practicing lawyer. Artificial intelligence is no longer a specialty topic. It is a competence obligation. ABA Model Rule 1.1, Comment 8, requires lawyers to "keep abreast of changes in the law and its practice, including the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology." More than 40 U.S. jurisdictions have adopted some form of that comment. ABA Formal Opinion 512 (2024) applies it directly to generative AI. In practice, the duty has four parts. Lawyers must understand how AI systems work well enough to evaluate their benefits and risks for a matter. They must verify AI-assisted work, because sanctions for fabricated, "hallucinated" citations have made Rule 3.3 and Rule 11 exposure real. They must protect confidences under Rule 1.6, since client data entered into third-party models may forfeit confidentiality or privilege. And under Rules 5.1 and 5.3, their supervisory duties extend to AI tools the firm uses. To make the analysis concrete, this article follows one hypothetical client. Meridian Health Systems is a U.S.-headquartered health company with operations in the EU and China. It is deploying "AskMeridian," a customer-facing generative assistant built on a third-party foundation model, augmented with agentic tools that schedule appointments and draft correspondence. Meridian's counsel must answer four recurring questions. Who bears the loss when the assistant hallucinates? Is Meridian exposed for the vendor's training data? Which regimes govern the same deployment at once? And what must the vendor contract say?
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