Montana AI Ethics Rules for Lawyers

The official instruments

Where Montana’s AI law actually lives

Ask where Montana regulates lawyers’ AI use and the answer is a map, not a statute book. There is no statewide instrument: no supreme court rule or policy, no bar ethics opinion, no formal guidance. We inspected the State Bar of Montana’s ethics-opinions index on July 1, 2026 and found nothing addressing artificial intelligence, a dated negative recorded the way the methodology requires. The regulation that does exist was written by trial judges for their own courthouses: two of Montana’s judicial districts have adopted AI provisions in their local rules of practice, and those two local rules are the instruments on this page. They are the first district-level local rules recorded in the tracker, which has admitted sub-state issuers before, the New York City Bar among them, but never below the statewide level on the court-rule side.

Rule 3.G: disclose, explain, certify, or be presumed AI-free

The Fourth Judicial District, sitting in Missoula and Mineral Counties, carries Rule 3.G, Pleading Requirements for Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence, in the October 31, 2025 revision of its Rules of Practice. It is the more demanding of Montana’s two rules. A party who uses generative AI in a filing must disclose that use, identify the specific tool, and explain how the tool was used, and must certify that the accuracy of every AI-drafted or AI-assisted portion has been checked. Then comes the clause that makes silence meaningful: a filing submitted without the certification is presumptively a certification that no generative AI was used at all. There is no opting out by saying nothing. The rule anchors responsibility in Rule 11 and the professional-conduct rules, and its sanctions reach dismissal without prejudice. Note the issuer precisely: this is a district-wide rule of practice, adopted for the whole district, not one judge’s standing order of the kind the court orders guide tracks chambers by chambers.

Rule 35: Yellowstone County’s shorter certification

The Thirteenth Judicial District, Yellowstone County, added Rule 35, titled Artificial Intelligence, to its Local Rules of Practice by action of the full ten-judge court, over Chief Judge Thomas Pardy’s signature, adopted and effective January 1, 2026. Its mechanics are leaner than Missoula’s. Any attorney or self-represented party who used generative AI in preparing a filed document must identify the type of AI used and certify that every citation to the law or to the record has been verified. No presumption clause, no narrative about how the tool was used, just identification plus a verification certificate that puts every cite on the signer’s account. The two rules differ enough that a firm filing in both Billings and Missoula needs venue-specific checklists, which is precisely the fragmentation problem statewide rules like Florida’s were adopted to end, and Montana has not ended it.

Activity beyond the rulebooks

Everything else we found in Montana is activity, not authority. The state bar’s journal has run AI pieces, but they are written by private practitioners and bar officers under their own names, education rather than guidance, so they stay out of the dataset. Two further items sit at the case and judge level: a dispute between the state’s public-defense office and District Judge Larson over generative-AI use, and an AI condition encountered in pro hac vice practice before Montana’s federal district court. The tracker records both as activity pending primary documents, because a fight about AI in one courtroom is a signal, not a rule. For filings outside the Fourth and Thirteenth Districts, the baseline duties govern: verification before signing, per the hallucination sanctions guide, a confidentiality analysis before any client data reaches a tool, per the Rule 1.6 breakdown, honest billing under the fee analysis, and a written office policy per the supervision rules. ABA Formal Opinion 512 supplies the reasoning, and the changelog will record the day Montana produces anything statewide.