Pennsylvania AI Ethics Rules for Lawyers

The official instruments

Two bars, one opinion

Pennsylvania’s contribution to the AI ethics landscape is structural before it is substantive: Joint Formal Opinion 2024-200 was issued together by the Pennsylvania Bar Association and the Philadelphia Bar Association, not by a single ethics committee. That two-bar authorship is unusual in this field, where the typical instrument carries one body’s name, and it matters in practice. A statewide bar and the bar of the Commonwealth’s largest legal market reaching the same conclusions, in the same document, gives the guidance more cross-jurisdictional weight inside Pennsylvania than either could supply alone. A Philadelphia litigator and a firm in Erie are reading the same considered position.

Get the citation right, though, because the joint character is also where Pennsylvania’s honesty problem starts. The opinion is advisory and non-binding on the Disciplinary Board. It is a formal opinion in name and form, but it does not carry disciplinary force: it expresses how the two bars believe existing duties apply to generative AI, not a new rule a lawyer can be sanctioned for breaching as such. And the date is softer than most: the opinion text itself is undated, with May 2024 drawn from contemporaneous coverage rather than a face date, so this tracker dates it to the month and declines to assert a specific day. The Pennsylvania Bar Association’s original copy sits behind a member login; the public copy practitioners actually read is the one hosted by LawSites, linked in the sources above. Precision on these points is the whole job, and the tracker labels the opinion’s type, date precision, and binding status exactly as the document supports.

The twelve best practices, in working order

The opinion’s substance arrives as twelve best practices. Rather than recite the list mechanically, group it the way a Pennsylvania firm would operationalize it. Verification leads: verify every citation and cited material before relying on AI output, the duty that the fabricated-citation cases made non-negotiable and that no later opinion has softened. Confidentiality follows: keep client data out of tools that lack confidentiality protections, which in practice means reading a tool’s data terms before any client information goes near it. Communication and consent come next, and Pennsylvania states them with care: communicate AI use to clients and obtain consent where needed, a situation-specific duty rather than a blanket one. Then the two items that distinguish a thorough opinion from a thin one, conflicts and bias: watch for AI-driven conflicts of interest and for bias in AI output, both of which require human judgment a tool cannot supply. And fees: ensure AI-related expenses are reasonable and disclosed, the same actual-cost discipline that runs through every credible AI opinion in the country.

For a Pennsylvania lawyer, the operational translation is the familiar artifact set built to the joint opinion’s specifics: an approved-tools register documenting each tool’s confidentiality terms; a verification workflow that treats every AI-surfaced citation as unconfirmed until checked in a traditional database; engagement-letter language addressing AI use and consent where the matter calls for it; a conflicts-and-bias review step that survives the temptation to trust fluent output; and a billing rule that passes AI efficiency to the client and discloses AI costs. The policy template implements each of these elements, and the comparison table places Pennsylvania’s consent-where-needed posture against the stricter and looser states around it, including neighboring West Virginia, whose informed-written-consent rule is the strictest in the country.

What advisory status does and does not change

It would be a mistake to read “advisory and non-binding” as “optional.” The twelve best practices restate duties that already bind Pennsylvania lawyers under the Rules of Professional Conduct as applied to any tool: competence, confidentiality, candor, supervision, reasonable fees. The opinion’s contribution is to translate those standing duties into AI-specific practice, with the combined authority of two bars behind the translation. A Pennsylvania lawyer who ignores it is not breaching the opinion; the lawyer is risking a breach of the underlying rules the opinion is interpreting, which is the exposure that actually matters. The deltas worth tracking over time are whether a numbered, binding instrument ever supersedes the joint opinion and whether the Disciplinary Board’s posture shifts; the changelog and alerts exist for precisely that kind of movement.

One layer Joint Formal Opinion 2024-200 does not address: the courts. The files verify no statewide Pennsylvania court rule governing AI in filings, which means a Pennsylvania lawyer’s court-facing obligations are judge-by-judge standing orders rather than a single uniform rule, particularly across the federal districts. That per-filing check, distinct from the bar-ethics duties on this page, is covered in the court orders guide; confirm the assigned judge’s individual practices before every filing, using the court’s own pages with the disclosure-orders overview and the Ropes & Gray tracker as a cross-check.