The increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the legal field raises too many complex legal and ethical issues to address in a single note. In this Note, I instead intend to focus in particular on AI’s impact on legal practice and professional ethics with regard to the way such programs “reason” and the applicability of existing Model Rules of Professional Conduct.

Part I will first examine how (and whether) the adoption of AI affects core ethical obligations such as competence, diligence, confidentiality, and the duty to provide independent legal judgment.

Part II will then address the degree to which we have been anthropomorphizing and ascribing agency to generative algorithms, explaining the way they “think.” Part II will next discuss the applicability of Model Rule of Professional Conduct 5.3, “Responsibilities Regarding Nonlawyer Assistance,” in that context.

Finally, Part III will reflect on what lawyers ought to keep in mind when working with these tools, in hopes that the integration of generative AI into legal services serves to enhance the profession. In order to further facilitate that objective, this Note will argue that such technology should be adopted by the legal field (and that trying to avoid this outcome is a fool’s errand), albeit subject to the same or similar rules to those the Model Rules already lay out.

As of February 2025, Formal Opinion 512 is the third-most recent formal opinion to have been issued by the American Bar Association (ABA). It is the ABA’s preliminary effort to address the use of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) tools, and as such, it is fairly broad ranging but necessarily shallow. The report notes that, “as with many new technologies, GAI tools are a moving target—indeed, a rapidly moving target—in the sense that their precise features and utility to law practice are quickly changing and will continue to change in ways that may be difficult or impossible to anticipate.” This is a mature stance to take on the matter, but perhaps a less than practical one. The law has historically been a slow-moving beast, and reactivity to evolving fields is therefore a persistently unfavorable matchup for it.

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