Friday, October 2, 2026
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Newsom Signs First-in-Nation Bill on Use of Artificial Intelligence Tools by Attorneys
By a MetNews Staff Writer
California has enacted legislation governing the use of artificial intelligence in legal work, codifying the warnings issued by recent jurisprudence and the State Bar that lawyers must refrain from delegating the practice of law to a program and restricting attorneys from uploading confidential information into certain AI systems.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the measure, Senate Bill 574, on Wednesday, making the Golden State the first in the country to adopt legislation specifically targeting the use of AI by lawyers. The move follows waves of courts across the country issuing opinions denouncing the influx of filings containing citations to hallucinated cases or fake quotes that appear nowhere in the decisions to which they are attributed.
Senate Bill 574 adds §6068.1 to the Business and Professions Code, which provides that “[a]n attorney shall not delegate the practice of law to generative artificial intelligence” and shall “[t]ake reasonable steps” to “[v]erify the accuracy of generative artificial intelligence outputs, including…the accuracy of all case and statutory citations” and “[c]orrect any erroneous or hallucinated output in any material used” by the lawyer.
Disclosure Required
The section further requires attorneys to “[d]isclose the use of generative artificial intelligence to the court for all documents submitted” and “consider” whether to make similar disclosures about “content provided to the public.”
Lawyers are additionally prohibited from entering “confidential, personal identifying, and other nonpublic information into a generative artificial intelligence system for which access…is not restricted to the attorney and persons authorized by the attorney under obligations to protect the confidentiality of the information.”
Code of Civil Procedure §128.7 is also amended by the measure to specify that “[a] brief, pleading, motion, or any other paper filed in any court shall not contain any citations that an attorney responsible for submitting the pleading has not personally verified, including any citation provided by generative artificial intelligence.”
That section, which imposes duties on lawyers to, among other obligations, sign pleadings and other court filings, contains a penalty provision that is left untouched by the bill. Subdivisions (c) and (d) allow for the imposition of sanctions for violations of the provision which are to be “limited to what is sufficient to deter repetition of this conduct or comparable conduct by others” and which may include monetary awards and reasonable attorney fees.
Law-Firm Responsibility
Law firms are on the hook for violations committed by any of “partners, associates, and employees.”
Similar restrictions are placed on arbitrators, who are precluded by the legislation from relying “on information generated by generative artificial intelligence outside the record without making appropriate disclosures to the parties beforehand and, as far as practical, allowing the parties to comment on its use” and from delegating any part of “their decisionmaking process to any generative artificial intelligence tool.”
Sen. Thomas Umberg, D-Santa Ana, authored the bill.
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