Source: Husch Blackwell

The Ohio Board of Professional Conduct released in April 2026 an Ethics Guide: Artificial Intelligence for Lawyers and Judicial Officers, a 12-page nonbinding document that synthesizes sanctions orders, disciplinary cases, and emerging national consensus into practical guardrails under the Ohio Rules of Professional Conduct and the Code of Judicial Conduct. The guide declares AI a "relevant technology" under Prof.Cond.R. 1.1, comment [8], and makes competence extend to understanding how tools work, what data they train on, and their documented tendency to produce hallucinations rather than verified legal authority.

The guide emphasizes that human verification of every citation, quotation, and proposition is the minimum standard, citing instances where AI-generated hallucinations led to sanctions, including State v. Coleman, 2026-Ohio-965, in which an Ohio lawyer received a $2,000 sanction and a referral to disciplinary counsel after hallucinated facts and quotations appeared in filings. It warns that client confidentiality under Prof.Cond.R. 1.6 requires reasonable precautions because many free or public AI platforms may store prompts, train on them, or disclose data; the guide recommends enterprise-grade tools (e.g., Westlaw AI, Lexis+ AI), ruthless anonymization, informed client consent when appropriate, clear billing disclosures for per-use AI costs, mandatory human verification protocols for filings and summaries, and advises judges to maintain technological competence while never delegating ultimate decision-making to AI due to risks of ex parte knowledge and embedded biases.