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A California bill draws a line around the practice of law

A bill on the floor of the California Assembly would write the duties of a lawyer who uses artificial intelligence directly into statute. Senate Bill 574 is carried by Senator Umberg, with Assemblymember Macedo as coauthor, and is titled “Attorneys, arbitrators, judicial officers, and alternative resolution providers”. It would add a new section 6068.1 to the Business and Professions Code, the California statute that governs the legal profession, and amend section 6173. It was amended in the Assembly on 21 August 2026 and ordered to third reading, the stage immediately before a floor vote.

What the new section would require

Most of the proposed duties describe conduct that can be measured. An attorney must not enter confidential, personal identifying or other nonpublic information into a generative artificial intelligence system whose access is not restricted to the attorney and to people the attorney authorises. An attorney must take reasonable steps to verify the accuracy of the system’s outputs, including every case and statutory citation. An attorney must correct any erroneous or hallucinated output, meaning material the system invented, in anything the attorney uses. An attorney must also disclose the use of generative artificial intelligence to the court for all documents submitted to it.

The bill defines generative artificial intelligence as a system that produces derived synthetic content, such as text, images, video or audio, which emulates the structure and characteristics of the data the system was trained on.

Arbitrators are treated separately, under the Code of Civil Procedure. A new section 1282.1 would stop an arbitrator delegating any part of the decision-making process to a generative artificial intelligence tool. It would also stop an arbitrator relying on information such a tool produced from outside the record, unless the parties were told first.

One sentence carries the weight

The proposed section 6068.1 also states: “An attorney shall not delegate the practice of law to generative artificial intelligence.” That line works differently from the others. Verification, correction and disclosure tell a lawyer how to use a tool with care. This one forbids a category of use outright, and everything then depends on what “the practice of law” covers.

That phrase has no settled boundary. Artificial Lawyer argues that courts have struggled for more than a century to define it, and that a blanket prohibition leaves no room for supervised use. The publication reads the provision as a risk to most legal artificial intelligence tools in the state. That reading is contested, and no court has yet interpreted the words in this bill.

Why the next few days decide it

Article IV, section 10 of the California Constitution stops the Legislature passing most bills on or after 1 September of an even-numbered year. The exceptions are narrow: election statutes, certain tax and appropriation bills for the usual expenses of the state, urgency measures, and bills taken up again after a governor’s veto. SB 574 is listed as an active bill in the floor process in the Assembly. Unless both houses pass it before that date, it falls and would have to start again.

For readers outside California, the drafting matters more than the jurisdiction. The bill separates two kinds of rule that are often merged in debates about artificial intelligence and professional duty. Rules about care, verification and confidentiality can be applied to any tool a lawyer picks up. A rule that forbids delegating an undefined activity is much harder to write, and harder still to enforce evenly. Any bar association or legislature drafting its own version will meet the same problem in the same sentence.

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