Michigan AI Ethics Rules for Lawyers

The official instruments

Guidance that tells you exactly what it is

Michigan’s instrument opens with a self-description most trackers flatten away: the State Bar of Michigan’s “Artificial Intelligence for Attorneys: Frequently Asked Questions,” published November 18, 2024, is explicitly neither legal advice nor an ethics opinion. That candor sets the citation weight. Michigan has no lawyer-facing formal opinion on generative AI; what it has is working guidance from the state bar, organized as questions and answers and kept current, with fee questions added on February 11, 2025. The update habit is worth noticing, because a document that grows in response to member questions behaves less like a frozen pronouncement and more like a maintained manual. For the bench there is a separate, older instrument, judicial ethics opinion JI-155 from 2023 on judges’ AI competence, which says nothing about practicing lawyers but confirms Michigan has been thinking about AI on both sides of the courtroom for a while.

The FAQs’ analytical spine is broad: they run generative AI across Michigan Rules 1.1 through 8.4 rather than isolating two or three favorite duties. The premise underneath every answer is accountability. Lawyers are responsible for all AI-generated content, and citations must be verified. Nothing in the format softens that; a Q&A that ends with the lawyer owning the output is stating the same rule a formal opinion would.

A consent trigger you can audit, and a quiet disclosure baseline

The FAQs’ most operationally useful holding is the consent trigger, because it names its rule. Client consent is required under MRPC 1.6(c)(1) before protected information is input into an AI tool. Pinning the duty to a subsection converts a vague “get consent for AI” instinct into a checkable condition: is protected client information about to enter this system? If yes, consent comes first; if no, the trigger is not tripped. That is a cleaner test than most states offer, and it points intake and matter teams to the precise moment the duty attaches, the input. How that consent conversation is run is the subject of the client disclosure guide.

On disclosure more broadly, Michigan sits with the quieter states: the FAQs impose no general duty to tell clients or courts about AI use absent rule triggers. The pairing is deliberate and coherent. Michigan does not want announcements; it wants control of inputs, consent where Rule 1.6(c)(1) demands it, and verified outputs the lawyer stands behind. The comparison table shows how that posture differs from consent-first jurisdictions, which is exactly the kind of variance a multi-state policy has to absorb.

Three billing lanes, and the Michigan build

The February 11, 2025 fee additions divide AI economics into three lanes that keep getting blurred elsewhere. Lane one: only actual time spent may be billed, so hours the tool eliminated are not billable hours. Lane two: AI subscriptions are normally overhead, absorbed by the firm like any research platform license. Lane three: matter-specific, per-use AI costs can move to the client, but only by advance agreement, never retroactively. A firm that memorializes lane three in its engagement letter and keeps lanes one and two straight in its billing system has implemented the Michigan fee analysis; the billing ethics explainer shows how other instruments reach parallel results.

Assembling the whole state into a workflow: screen tools before use and identify where protected information could flow, capture MRPC 1.6(c)(1) consent before any such input, verify every citation and factual assertion in AI output before it leaves the firm, and encode all of it in a written policy with training so responsibility for AI-generated content is assigned rather than assumed; the policy template covers each piece. The courtroom adds its own layer, since our dataset records no statewide Michigan court rule on AI filings: individual judges’ standing orders can still impose certification or disclosure duties the FAQs do not, so the assigned judge’s requirements get checked before each filing, per the court orders guide. Updates to the FAQs, which have already grown once, will appear in the changelog as they are verified.