Delaware AI Ethics Rules for Lawyers

No AI-specific instrument yet

This jurisdiction had issued no AI-specific ethics opinion, court rule, or formal guidance as of our last review. That does not make AI use ungoverned here: the existing rules of professional conduct — competence, confidentiality, supervision, and candor — apply to generative AI the way they apply to any other tool, and ABA Formal Opinion 512 is the reference point most bars borrow in the meantime. The breakdown below covers what that means in practice; the changelog will record the week anything official issues.

A dated negative, checked against the index

Delaware’s absence from AI instrument lists is real, and we verified it rather than assumed it. As of July 1, 2026, the Delaware State Bar Association’s ethics-opinions index lists Opinion 2021-1, addressing remote practice, as its most recent entry, and no AI-specific opinion, court rule, or formal bar guidance for attorneys surfaced in any source this tracker checked. The date matters because negatives rot: a page that says never is wrong the day something issues. The tracker treats Delaware as a monitored gap, and the methodology explains how a verified negative earns a page without inflating the instrument count.

The bench wrote its own rules first

What Delaware does have deserves prominence: a judiciary that governed itself early. On October 21, 2024, the Delaware Supreme Court adopted the Interim Policy on the Use of Generative AI by Judicial Officers and Court Personnel, acting on the recommendation of the Delaware Commission on Law and Technology. The policy runs on five principles. Users are responsible for the output they rely on, so accuracy problems cannot be laundered through the tool. Training comes before use, making familiarity a precondition rather than an aspiration. Decision-making cannot be delegated to AI, the principle with the most constitutional weight behind it: judgment stays human. Use must comply with applicable law. And non-public information stays out of tools that have not been approved, the confidentiality principle in institutional form. Anyone practicing in Delaware’s courts should read it, not because it binds lawyers, it does not, but because it reveals the bench’s own operating assumptions about the technology arriving in its filings.

The line between describing and counting

This dataset admits instruments that govern attorneys; the interim policy governs the bench and its staff. So Delaware’s entry works the way a precise map should: the judiciary activity is described in full above, while the attorney-facing instrument count stays at zero, because inflating it would misstate what a Delaware lawyer can actually be held to. The Delaware Commission on Law and Technology, the body whose recommendation produced the interim policy, also maintains a resources page collecting AI articles for practitioners; those are education written by private authors, not official guidance, and they carry no disciplinary authority. If Delaware issues something attorney-facing, from the bar association or from the courts, this page converts from a negative into a deep-dive, and the changelog will say so the week the primary source verifies.

What governs Delaware lawyers in the meantime

An empty instrument column changes nothing about the duties. Competence requires understanding what a generative tool does before it touches client work. Confidentiality requires knowing where a prompt goes and what the vendor retains, analyzed before first use, as the confidentiality guide details. Verification stands between AI drafting and anything filed or sent, and the sanctions caselaw documents the cost of skipping it. Billing follows actual time, per the billing analysis, and office-wide oversight runs through the supervision rules. ABA Formal Opinion 512 assembles that framework nationally, the policy template turns it into an internal document, and because individual Delaware judges may impose chambers-level requirements at any time, the court orders guide covers the per-filing check that no statewide silence excuses.