What do the bar rules require before a lawyer uses AI on client matters?
The obligations are written down and they belong to the lawyer, not to the software. Competence, confidentiality, communication with the client, supervision of the work, reasonable fees and candour to the court all continue to apply, and the American Bar Association addressed generative AI directly in Formal Opinion 512 in 2024, with a growing number of state bars issuing their own guidance that differs on the points that matter most, including client consent. No vendor can discharge a lawyer's duty. What a vendor can do is publish the artifacts that make discharging it practical, and on that the market is largely silent. Of 130 legal AI vendors recorded by the AI Legal Index, 0 publish a mapping of their product to named ethics opinions across more than one jurisdiction, 4 engage in public with even one named opinion, 21 refer to professional responsibility in general terms without naming any guidance, and 105 publish nothing located on the subject at all.
The duty is the lawyer’s and the applicable rules vary by jurisdiction, so this page does not tell anyone what their obligations are and is not a substitute for reading the guidance that binds them. What an index can do is answer the question the guidance leaves open, which is what the market has published against it. The AI Legal Index records four professional responsibility signals on every vendor and grades all of them on UPL and Professional Responsibility Posture. Those five records are what the rest of this page reports.
Has the vendor engaged with the guidance its buyers are bound by?
Named guidance addressedNot whether the vendor claims to take ethics seriously. Whether it has read the opinions its customers are governed by and published something a firm can hand to its own risk committee.
Not one of the 130 vendors in this index publishes a mapping of its product to named ethics opinions across more than one jurisdiction. That is the artifact a multi state firm actually needs, because the state guidance differs on the points that decide the answer, and it is the single largest unclaimed position in this market. The first vendor to publish one will be the only vendor who has.
Below the named tier, 21 vendors refer to professional responsibility in general terms without naming any guidance, and 105 of 130 publish nothing located on the subject. A signal records what public sources say on the date shown. It is not a grade and it is not a recommendation. Where a signal reads Not addressed, it means the index did not locate the material in public sources on that date, which is a statement about disclosure rather than about the product.
What happens to the bill when the work takes an hour instead of six?
Ethics guidance is direct that a lawyer bills for time actually spent, so a product that compresses six hours into one has changed the invoice and not only the workflow. 102 of 130 vendors claim time savings in their public materials while publishing nothing about billing, fee or disclosure treatment. 0 publish both a per matter record of AI assisted work and guidance on how to treat it on the bill. 7 emit a usable record with no published fee guidance: Anaqua, Brightflag, Counsel Stack, Legal Tracker, Mitratech, SimpleLegal and Vesence. 21 address none of it. The gap between marketing hours saved to the buyer and staying silent on the client's side of that same equation is the most commercially uncomfortable finding in this index, and it is also the easiest one for a vendor to fix.
Vendors that emit a record of AI assisted work
Audit record onlyIf a judge requires an AI disclosure, can the product produce one?
Exportable disclosure recordA number of judges now require filers to disclose whether generative AI was used and to certify that citations were checked by a human. Answering that honestly means knowing which model produced which passage, what was retrieved and who verified it. 1 of 130 vendors export a document level record covering all three. 70 produce some of it, short of a document level export. 1 publish guidance or a template with no product support behind it, and 58 publish nothing on court disclosure or verification certification. The certifying signature belongs to the lawyer either way. The difference is whether the record behind it takes two minutes to produce or has to be reconstructed from memory.
Can a firm get this vendor through a client’s AI clause?
Disclosure pack publishedCorporate clients have started writing AI terms into outside counsel guidelines, which reverses the direction of diligence. The firm now has to evidence its vendor to its own client, and the artifacts are a current subprocessor list, a statement of which model providers see client content, and something forwardable.
A further 27 publish a current subprocessor or model provider list without the client facing material around it. 39 hold the material behind a sales conversation or an executed agreement, which is the tier worth watching, because a firm under a client deadline experiences on request as absent. 58 of 130 publish nothing that supports a client side disclosure obligation.
The graded axis behind these four records
UPL and Professional Responsibility Posture asks whether the vendor is clear that it supplies a tool rather than legal advice, who its audience is, and how it addresses unauthorized practice, competence and supervision duties and jurisdiction limits. Across 130 vendors: 7 A, 37 B, 35 C and 51 D.
Graded A on the axis
AA on UPL and Professional Responsibility PostureThe vendor states plainly what the product is and is not, who may use it, and how it supports a lawyer’s competence and supervision duties. Jurisdiction limits are named and any consumer facing surface carries a clear disclosure.Graded B on the axis
BB on UPL and Professional Responsibility PostureA real position is published on advice versus tooling, short of full treatment: commonly a disclaimer without the supervision and competence dimension, or silence on jurisdiction limits.- Alt LegalIP & Patents
- AscentAIRegulatory & Compliance Counsel
- AugustGeneral Legal Assistants
- Bloomberg LawLegal Research
- Blue JLegal Research
- CaseMineLegal Research
- CasepointLitigation & eDiscovery
- ClearbriefLitigation & eDiscovery
- Counsel StackLegal Research
- Docket AlarmLegal Research
- FilevinePlaintiff & Claims AI
- GC AIGeneral Legal Assistants
- Genie AIGeneral Legal Assistants
- HonaIntake & Client Development
- IvoContract Review & Drafting
- LexroomLegal Research
- MarqVisionIP & Patents
- NeosPlaintiff & Claims AI
- Norm AiRegulatory & Compliance Counsel
- NoxtuaGeneral Legal Assistants
- OmnilexLegal Research
- OntraLegal Ops & Spend
- PatlyticsIP & Patents
- Paxton AIGeneral Legal Assistants
- ProPlaintiffPlaintiff & Claims AI
- QuestelIP & Patents
- SandstoneLegal Ops & Spend
- SecuritiRegulatory & Compliance Counsel
- SmartAdvocatePlaintiff & Claims AI
- SpotDraftContract Review & Drafting
- StenoLitigation & eDiscovery
- Streamline AILegal Ops & Spend
- UniCourtLegal Research
- VesenceGeneral Legal Assistants
- Vincent AILegal Research
- WordsmithGeneral Legal Assistants
- XLSCOUTIP & Patents
What the index cannot tell you
Whether any particular use of any particular product satisfies any particular rule. That depends on the jurisdiction, the matter, the client and the lawyer, and it is not a question an index answers. A vendor publishing nothing about ethics guidance is a statement about that vendor’s disclosure and not about anyone’s compliance. Nothing here is legal advice.
The records also reach only as far as public material. A vendor that walks a firm through all of this in a procurement call and publishes none of it grades on what it published, and an absence is dated: it means not located in public sources on the date shown, redated the day the vendor publishes. The reason the published position still matters is that a procurement call leaves no artifact, and an artifact is what a firm hands to its risk committee, its client, or a court asking what steps were taken.
Every record behind this page carries a source basis and a verification date. Standards and limits are on the methodology page. The confidentiality duty is answered on what happens to privilege when a law firm uses a third party AI tool and on do legal AI vendors train their models on client data, the competence and verification side is on which AI legal research tools publish their hallucination or accuracy rates, the attestation half of the outside counsel guideline pair is on which legal AI vendors publish SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification, and the complete vendor set is in the directory.