New Hampshire AI Ethics Rules for Lawyers

The official instruments

Guidance as a series, not a single document

New Hampshire answered generative AI the way a bar teaches rather than the way a court legislates: in installments. Across 2024 the New Hampshire Bar Association’s Ethics Committee published three practical-ethics articles, one on using AI in practice at all, one on drafting documents with it, and one on discrimination and bias, and each passed through the NHBA Board of Governors before publication, which separates the series from an individual author’s musings. The tracker lists all three as instruments, typed as guidance, because that is what they are: committee-written, board-reviewed positions without the formal-opinion label. New Hampshire had issued no formal NHBA ethics opinion on AI and no judiciary order when we ran our checks, so the series is the state’s attorney-facing authority, and the bar keeps a single hyperlinked index of its opinions and articles that makes the distinction easy to audit.

May 2024: adoption is optional, diligence about it is not

The opening article, Ethics of Using Artificial Intelligence in Practice, submitted to the Board of Governors on February 8, 2024 and published May 15, 2024, sets the frame. There is no ethical duty to adopt AI. Choosing to use it triggers Rule 1.1 technological competence, and the committee is specific about the failure mode: outputs must be vetted, with Mata v. Avianca as the standing example, because unvetted output can implicate Rules 3.3, 3.4, 4.1, and 8.4(c), the candor and honesty cluster the sanctions caselaw keeps enforcing. Rule 1.6 governs how tools handle client data, Rules 5.1 and 5.3 put AI use inside the firm’s supervision structure, and Rule 2.1 keeps professional judgment independent of the machine’s fluency. The article closes where every bar eventually lands, on firm-level safeguards and policies, the same architecture the policy template implements.

September 2024: drafting, consent, and the outside-tool line

The second article, Ethics of Drafting Documents with Artificial Intelligence, reviewed by the board on June 7, 2024 and published September 10, 2024, draws New Hampshire’s sharpest line. Drafting with outside generative AI, tools that process data beyond the firm’s control, is permissible only with caveats: Rule 1.4 requires consulting the client, and Rule 1.6 requires informed consent, before client information is disclosed to an outside tool, and the committee counsels avoiding outside generative AI for pleadings altogether. Verification duties under Rules 1.1 and 3.3 cover everything drafted, supervision under Rules 5.1 through 5.3 extends expressly to nonhuman assistance, and generic drafting uses that expose no client information stay permissible. The article also plants a flag other states have mostly not: a possible future Rule 1.5 duty to use cost-reducing technology, fee ethics running toward AI rather than away from it, a thread the billing analysis follows nationally. The client disclosure guide covers the consent mechanics the committee assumes.

October 2024: bias, and the committee that comes next

The closing article, Understanding Generative Artificial Intelligence and The Potential for Discrimination and Bias, reviewed October 24, 2024 and published October 30, 2024, treats bias as a competence subject: Rule 1.1 includes understanding that models can carry discrimination into legal work. Its most practical holding is a boundary. Inadvertent AI-introduced bias is not by itself a Rule 8.4(g) violation, which requires purpose or animus, but Rule 2.1’s independent-judgment duty requires critically evaluating output rather than passing it through. The article commends ABA Formal Opinion 512, and our 512 breakdown shows how closely the national framework tracks New Hampshire’s series. What comes next is already chartered: an NHBA Special Committee on AI, chaired by President-Elect Bob Lucic, is developing further guidance, and whatever it produces will be verified against the bar’s own publications and logged in the changelog before this page changes. Until then the confidentiality breakdown and the supervision rules cover the two duties the series leans on hardest.