Generative AI has created a serious professional-governance challenge for the legal profession. Lawyers must evaluate rapidly changing AI tools, manage uncertain professional risks, and account for a growing number of sanctions cases involving AI-generated fake citations. That challenge is compounded when the institutions lawyers typically rely on for ethical guidance provide advice that is incomplete, imprecise, or incorrect. Recent guidance from the American Bar Association and the Mississippi State Bar does exactly that.
Mississippi Ethics Opinion No. 267 is one example. The opinion permits lawyers to use generative AI if they protect client confidentiality, use the technology competently, verify AI outputs, bill reasonably, and obtain informed consent where appropriate. Those general principles are unobjectionable.
The problem is the opinion’s guidance on verification and reliance. The Mississippi opinion states that when a lawyer uses a generative AI tool, the lawyer should “trust but verify” the AI-generated outputs. But that is misguided.
Lawyers should not begin from a posture of trust when using tools known to generate false legal authorities, invent quotations, misstate holdings, and produce confident but inaccurate analysis. The ethical posture should be the opposite: assume the output is unverified until the lawyer independently confirms it.
One might argue it’s a distinction without a difference because the Mississippi opinion still advises lawyers to verify AI outputs. But a state bar should not proclaim that “trust” is the default posture toward a technology whose central professional risk is plausible falsehood.
And the deeper problem appears in the opinion’s discussion of how much verification is actually required. Mississippi Opinion No. 267 states: “a lawyer’s use of a GAI tool designed specifically for the practice of law or to perform a discrete legal task, such as generating ideas, may require less independent verification or review, particularly where a lawyer’s prior experience with the GAI tool provides a reasonable basis for relying on its results.”
That language is not unique to Mississippi. It comes verbatim from ABA Formal Opinion 512, the American Bar Association’s official AI ethics opinion issued in July 2024.
That guidance, adopted by both the ABA and the Mississippi Bar, is wrong.
Consider how it operates in practice. A lawyer uses a legal-specific generative AI tool to conduct legal research. The tool is designed for legal practice and for finding caselaw, a discrete legal task. The lawyer has used the product before, believes it performs well, and has never personally seen it fabricate a case.
Under the ABA and Mississippi opinions, prior experience may provide “a reasonable basis for relying on [the tool’s] results,” and therefore may require “less independent verification or review.” Coupled with the Mississippi Bar’s instruction to “trust but verify,” the practical message is clear: a lawyer may begin from trust and reduce review when using a familiar, legal-specific AI tool.
That is precisely the wrong guidance. If that lawyer trusts the output and applies a lowered standard of verification to AI-generated caselaw research, the lawyer may end up filing fake citations in court, joining a growing list of litigants and lawyers who have done the same.
