Kansas 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 county rule identified, a record still pending

Kansas is the rare state where this tracker’s honest posture is: we know where the instrument is, and we are not yet allowed to describe it. In the verification work behind our July 2026 expansion, Shawnee County District Court Rule 3.125 was identified as an AI-related local rule of the district court for Shawnee County. County-level district rules are a species this dataset already handles, Montana carries two of them, and the scope lesson transfers directly: a local rule governs practice in that district’s courts, it is not statewide law, and a lawyer’s exposure to it depends on where the case is filed. What this page will not do is describe Rule 3.125’s text, its requirements, or its dates, because the tracker’s full verified record for the rule has not yet been consolidated into the public dataset. Until it is, the rule appears here as an identified instrument awaiting its entry, and this page ships with an empty dataset column rather than a paraphrase we cannot yet stand behind, the tradeoff the methodology page explains. When the record clears, the entry and a full description will follow, and the changelog will mark the week. In the meantime, the practical takeaway already stands: AI obligations in Kansas can arise at the county level, which makes the per-court habit in our court orders guide the operative discipline.

The Supreme Court built a study committee

The statewide movement is real, and it is a committee. Kansas Supreme Court Administrative Order 2025-CM-017, which we read in full in a live browser session on July 19, 2026 because kscourts.gov blocks automated retrieval, was filed February 27, 2025 and signed for the court by Chief Justice Marla Luckert. Acting under the judicial power vested by the Kansas Constitution, the order recites both sides of the technology, potential gains in efficiency and access to justice against risks of confidentiality breaches, inaccuracy, and bias, and creates the Ad Hoc Artificial Intelligence Committee, effective the date of the order, with duties that include studying the use of AI as it relates to the judicial branch. The committee has 21 members, co-chaired by Chief Judge Jared Johnson of the 28th Judicial District and Meryl Carver-Allmond, general counsel to the chief justice, and its membership spans district and appellate judges, clerks, court administrators, and legal professionals drawn from law schools, private practice, and the capital appellate defender’s office. All of that is genuine motion at the top of the Kansas court system, and none of it is an instrument: an order creating a committee to study AI governs no lawyer’s filing and changes no duty. This page therefore records it as judiciary activity, the same line Delaware and Connecticut illustrate, while noting the obvious: study committees of this composition are how statewide instruments get drafted.

The bar side, said exactly

The Kansas Bar Association does not publicly index its ethics advisory opinions. When we checked on July 19, 2026, the legacy ethics-opinions address on ksbar.org returned Page Not Found, and the Ethics Advisory Committee’s page rendered only generic homepage content. So the precise statement, and the only one this page will make, is: no Kansas AI ethics opinion is publicly listed. That is a claim about what is published, not about what exists. In states with a public index, this tracker reads the index and dates the negative; in Kansas there is no index to read, so the verifiable fact is the absence of any public listing, and an advisory opinion could exist in files we cannot see. The difference between “none is publicly listed” and “none exists” is small on the page and large in practice, and keeping it is most of what the methodology means by evidence discipline.

Running a Kansas practice meanwhile

With the one identified rule sitting at county level and its record pending, Kansas practice is a filing-layer question stacked on the national baseline. The baseline first: confidentiality analysis before client information reaches any generative tool, per the confidentiality guide, with the tool risk tiers as the sorting framework; verification of every AI-assisted output against real authority, the discipline the hallucination sanctions caselaw enforces; billing for actual time, per the billing analysis; and a written policy that makes the supervision rules operational, built from the policy template with ABA Formal Opinion 512 as the reasoning underneath. Then the filing layer: because Kansas obligations can arise court by court and county by county, the pre-filing check in the court orders guide is not optional here, in Shawnee County or anywhere else. The committee’s existence means statewide movement is plausible, the pending Shawnee record means this page has a scheduled upgrade, and both will land in the changelog the week the primary sources let us publish them.