North Dakota AI Ethics Rules for Lawyers

The official instruments

A notice addressed to whoever signs the filing

North Dakota’s answer to generative AI arrived as a public notice, not a rule amendment or an ethics opinion. The North Dakota Court System’s Public Notice on the Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), dated June 1, 2026, is written to attorneys, self-represented litigants, and the public, and it is about filings, which is what makes it an attorney-facing instrument for the tracker rather than an internal technology policy of the kind several judiciaries have adopted for their own personnel. Its two opening moves define the state’s posture. First, AI is not prohibited in matters before North Dakota’s courts. Second, using it moves no responsibility anywhere: the attorney or self-represented litigant who submits a document owns all of it, AI errors and fabricated citations included. The methodology types the notice honestly as guidance, since it announces how existing rules will be applied rather than writing new ones.

The enforcement plumbing already existed

What gives the notice consequences is that it points at machinery North Dakota courts already run. Filings must comply with Rule 11 of the North Dakota Rules of Civil Procedure, and a court that receives a noncompliant document may strike it and impose sanctions under Rule 11.5 of the North Dakota Rules of Court. On the disciplinary ledger, the notice maps AI use onto the North Dakota Rules of Professional Conduct: Rule 1.1 competence for anyone deploying the tools, the candor pairing of Rules 3.1 and 3.3 read to require personal verification of every cited authority before it appears in a filing, and Rules 5.1 and 5.3 supervision for offices whose lawyers and staff use AI. The verification framing deserves the emphasis, because it is where the sanctions caselaw nationally has concentrated: the notice leaves no room for delegating cite-checking to the tool that produced the cites.

No disclosure mandate, plus a confidentiality warning

Two further choices shape the document. North Dakota requires no disclosure of AI use by itself: no certificate, no cover-sheet statement, no mandatory identification of the tool, which puts the state on the accountability side of the national split that the disclosure requirements survey maps, nearer Illinois and New York than the certification jurisdictions. And the notice carries a confidentiality caution written for the filing public but structurally identical to the lawyer’s duty: personal identifying information, protected health information, and sealed material stay out of AI tools. For attorneys, the Rule 1.6 breakdown runs the full version of that analysis. The notice closes with a reservation that it is subject to ongoing revision, so its terms should be re-read rather than remembered; the changelog records the day its text changes.

The bar’s shelf is clean; the duties are not optional

The State Bar Association of North Dakota has issued no AI ethics opinion: we inspected its ethics-opinions index on July 1, 2026 and found nothing on artificial intelligence, a dated verified negative of the kind this tracker records instead of assuming. The bar’s AI activity is education, a continuing-legal-education series on the technology, which teaches but does not govern. So North Dakota practice runs on the notice plus the baseline: billing that follows actual time per the fee ethics analysis, office-wide oversight per the supervision rules, a written policy built from the policy template, and the national framework of ABA Formal Opinion 512. Because individual judges can layer chambers-level requirements on top of a permissive statewide posture, the court orders guide stays in the North Dakota filing checklist.