Idaho 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.

The index says not yet

Idaho enters this tracker as a verified gap. On July 1, 2026 we inspected the Idaho State Bar’s formal ethics opinions index and found it ends at Formal Ethics Opinion 137, dated September 18, 2024, an opinion about public-defender conflicts with nothing to say about artificial intelligence. Nothing AI-specific for lawyers surfaced anywhere else we checked either, which leaves Idaho without an AI instrument for attorneys as of July 1, 2026. The finding carries its date on purpose: a negative is only as good as the day it was checked, so the tracker schedules re-verification instead of assuming permanence, as the methodology describes.

A yearlong project, described by the chief justice himself

The most reliable signal about Idaho’s direction comes from the top of its court system. In an essay published on the Idaho State Bar’s blog on December 29, 2025, AI in the Courts: Balancing Tradition and Innovation, Chief Justice G. Richard Bevan described a yearlong effort the Idaho judiciary launched in September 2025 to develop principles for artificial intelligence, with recommendations to go to the Idaho Supreme Court. Those recommendations were still pending at this page’s last verification. A yearlong effort begun in September 2025 implies a natural end point sometime in 2026, but the essay commits to no date and neither do we. Whatever issues, from soft principles to court rules, would be Idaho’s first AI instrument, and on the current path it will come from the bench rather than the bar.

The executive branch got there first, for its own judges

Idaho does have one set of published AI guidelines, and the fine print is the point: on September 24, 2025, the Idaho Office of Administrative Hearings issued AI guidelines for its administrative law judges. That is an executive-branch office governing its own hearing officers, not an instrument governing lawyers, so it does not enter the dataset. It still earns its mention twice over. Practitioners who appear in Idaho administrative hearings will encounter it from across the bench, and its existence illustrates a sequence this tracker keeps seeing: institutions write AI rules for their own staff before anyone writes them for attorneys. Delaware is the fullest example of that same order of operations.

Running an Idaho practice on the baseline

Until the judiciary’s principles effort produces something attorney-facing, an Idaho lawyer’s obligations are the familiar ones, applied with current-tool literacy. Confidentiality means a vendor and retention analysis before client information reaches any generative tool, and the confidentiality breakdown shows how to run one. Competence and candor mean outputs get checked against real authority before use, the discipline the hallucination sanctions guide exists to motivate. Fees follow actual time, per the billing analysis, and the office-level duty is a written, trained policy under the supervision rules; the policy template provides the skeleton and ABA Formal Opinion 512 the reasoning behind each section. Individual judges can impose filing requirements regardless of statewide silence, so the court orders guide stays part of Idaho practice, and the moment the supreme court acts on the pending recommendations, the changelog will carry the update.