Arkansas AI Ethics Rules for Lawyers

The official instruments

From matched proposals to matched adoptions

On June 5, 2025 the Arkansas Supreme Court published a pair of per curiam proposals that together sketched the state’s whole intended approach to generative AI: a proposed Administrative Order No. 25 on artificial intelligence (2025 Ark. 117) and proposed amendments to the Arkansas Rules of Professional Conduct (2025 Ark. 115). The comment window closed August 1, 2025. On December 11, 2025 the court adopted both, effective immediately. In re Adoption of Arkansas Supreme Court Administrative Order No. 25 Artificial Intelligence, 2025 Ark. 220 (per curiam), states that the comment period closed without substantive comments and adopts the order in full; In re Amendments to the Arkansas Rules of Professional Conduct, 2025 Ark. 221 (per curiam), adopts the conduct-rule amendments and sets them out in line-in, line-out form. The tracker now lists both entries as current, with the December 11, 2025 adoption date and the adoption citations attached, and the changelog records the status change.

How the adoption was confirmed

Until July 19, 2026 this page said something different, and the reason is worth keeping on the record. Arkansas publishes its current rules through a database that resists automated checking, our July 1, 2026 verification pass could not confirm a final disposition from the court’s current-rules source, and the methodology page does not let a status change ride on inference, so both entries stayed at proposed. A live browser read of the court’s own Lexum databases on July 19, 2026 resolved the question. The adoption per curiams sit in the court’s opinions database; the current Administrative Orders compilation, marked rule current to January 29, 2026, carries Order 25 with a history line reading Adopted December 11, 2025; and the court’s amendments-and-adoptions table records both orders as effective December 11, 2025. One wrinkle survives, and honest labeling requires stating it: the posted compilation of the Rules of Professional Conduct still read Rule Current To 06/12/2025 when we checked, a lag that predates the amendment. The adoption per curiams, not that lagging compilation, are the operative primary sources for the rules as they now stand.

What Administrative Order No. 25 says, and who it binds

The order works in two layers, and describing it accurately means keeping them apart. Section 1 is awareness, and it reaches everyone: all participants in the court system, attorneys included, must be mindful when entering client or court data into any electronic system that generates responses or uses generative AI. The section spells out why. Certain tools retain submitted data to build their models; anyone putting confidential or sealed information into a generative AI system should determine whether the system retains and uses it; and disclosure of confidential or sealed client or case information, intentional or inadvertent, may violate Administrative Order 19, Arkansas statutes limiting access to court records, the Arkansas Rules of Professional Conduct, the Code of Judicial Conduct, and applicable rules of procedure. The order is unusually concrete about its terms, distinguishing public large language models hosted by third parties, with OpenAI’s GPT and Anthropic’s Claude named as examples, from private models an organization controls. Section 2 is prohibition, and it is court-facing rather than bar-facing: Administrative Office of the Courts staff, all clerks of courts and their staff at the district, circuit, and appellate levels, and anyone else with access to internal CourtConnect may not intentionally expose the state courts’ internal data to generative AI using a public LLM. Research and analysis projects may be approved by the Supreme Court’s Automation Committee, and the CIS Division may run research and analysis for the courts’ benefit. Read honestly, AO 25’s binding section is a rule for the court system’s own data handlers, not an attorney-discipline rule; for lawyers, its weight arrives through Section 1’s warnings and the conduct rules those warnings cross-reference. Our confidentiality guide works through the same retention question Section 1 now tells every court participant to ask.

Preamble paragraph 22, now in the rules

The conduct-rule amendment is striking for how little text it needs. Paragraph 22 of the Preamble now reads: “Unless otherwise specified, nothing in these rules prohibits an attorney’s use of non-human assistance, including, but not limited to, artificial intelligence (AI). However, the use of non-human assistance does not excuse or mitigate any violation of the rules that occurs from using such assistance. Please be advised of Administrative Order No. 25 before using AI.” Three sentences: permission, accountability, and a cross-reference that ties the two December 11 orders together. The same per curiam retitles Rule 5.3’s heading from Nonlawyer Assistants to Nonlawyer Assistance, with conforming text changes, so the supervision rule reads naturally against tools as well as people. The origin recorded at the proposal stage still holds: the package reached the court on the unanimous recommendation of the Arkansas Bar Association’s AI Task Force, approved by the court’s Civil Practice Committee, a bar-to-court pipeline rather than a court acting alone. With adoption, Arkansas sits in the small set of states with AI language inside the conduct rules themselves rather than in an opinion about them; Colorado followed with its own preamble-level amendment in January 2026, and California’s proposed rule package is the largest one still pending.

Practicing in Arkansas under the adopted rules

An Arkansas lawyer now works under rules that name AI directly, and the practical reading is straightforward. Paragraph 22 sets the frame: the rules do not forbid AI, and they do not forgive it, so every existing duty (competence, confidentiality, candor, supervision) applies at full strength to AI-assisted work. Before client or case information enters any generative AI tool, run the retention check Section 1 of Administrative Order No. 25 describes, and treat the order’s public-versus-private LLM distinction as the sorting test; keep confidential and sealed material out of public tools entirely; verify outputs before they reach a filing; and put supervision expectations in writing, since Rule 5.3 now speaks of nonlawyer assistance in terms that include the non-human kind. The national baseline of ABA Formal Opinion 512 still supplies the reasoning behind each step, the policy template and the tool risk tiers implement them, and filing-layer obligations remain judge by judge, so the court orders guide applies in Arkansas the way it does everywhere. Both dataset entries now carry their adoption date, their adoption citations, and a July 19, 2026 verification stamp; if the posted rules compilation catches up, or anything else moves, the changelog will record it the week we can prove it.