Tennessee AI Ethics Rules for Lawyers

No AI-specific instrument yet

This jurisdiction had issued no AI-specific ethics opinion, court rule, or formal guidance as of our last review. That does not make AI use ungoverned here: the existing rules of professional conduct — competence, confidentiality, supervision, and candor — apply to generative AI the way they apply to any other tool, and ABA Formal Opinion 512 is the reference point most bars borrow in the meantime. The breakdown below covers what that means in practice; the changelog will record the week anything official issues.

A negative built on a full index read

Tennessee’s formal-opinion record allowed something stronger than a spot check: we read the Board of Professional Responsibility’s formal ethics opinions index in full on July 1, 2026, through its newest listings, 2025-F-171 and a withdrawn 2025-F-172, and no opinion in it addresses artificial intelligence. So Tennessee stands as a verified negative as of July 1, 2026: no AI-specific opinion, no court rule for lawyers, no formal bar guidance. The tracker pairs every such negative with its inspection date and scope, per the methodology, because an index that was clean in July binds no one in October.

Committees convened, comments sought, nothing yet issued

Tennessee has process in motion on two tracks. The Tennessee Bar Association established an AI Task Force in 2024, chaired by A.J. Bahou; through our verification it had published no report, no guidelines, no recommendation, which keeps it machinery to watch rather than authority to cite. The second track runs through the state’s highest court: the Tennessee Supreme Court has sought public comment on alternative legal service providers and artificial intelligence, an inquiry that news coverage frames around whether lawyer licensing itself should evolve. We handle that item with unusual restraint for a reason we would rather disclose than hide: it is a public-comment order whose primary text we have not yet retrieved, and the secondary accounts of it conflict on dates, so this page asserts neither a date nor terms. When the order itself is read, the changelog will carry whatever it turns out to be.

Whiting: a federal case wearing Tennessee facts

One decision dominates any search about Tennessee lawyers and AI, and it needs a clear label: it is federal, not a Tennessee instrument. In Whiting v. City of Athens, decided March 13, 2026 in consolidated appeals out of the Eastern District of Tennessee, the Sixth Circuit found briefs from two Knoxville attorneys carrying, by the court’s conservative estimate, more than two dozen fake citations and misrepresentations of fact, and it answered with fifteen thousand dollars in punitive sanctions from each attorney, the appellees’ full reasonable appellate fees, and double costs. The court made no express finding that generative AI produced the fabrications, because the attorneys never answered whether they had used it, so our sanctions tracker records Whiting as a fabricated-citations case rather than a confirmed AI case. For a Tennessee practitioner the takeaway survives the labeling nuance: the Sixth Circuit sits atop every Tennessee federal appeal, and unverified citations are being priced accordingly, the pattern the sanctions survey documents state by state.

The baseline, while the comment period runs

Nothing about an empty instrument column suspends a duty, and Tennessee’s legislature staying busy on adjacent ground, the ELVIS Act, Senate Bill 1580, on AI voice and likeness among its output, changes nothing about lawyer conduct either. What governs today is the familiar set: a confidentiality gate before client information reaches any tool, per the Rule 1.6 breakdown; verification of every authority before filing, the lesson Whiting teaches at federal prices; actual-time billing per the fee ethics analysis; office-wide oversight per the supervision rules, written down using the policy template; and the national framework of ABA Formal Opinion 512. Because individual judges, state and federal, can impose their own AI requirements case by case, the court orders guide stays in the Tennessee filing checklist.