Washington AI Ethics Rules for Lawyers

The official instruments

An opinion written for more than one generation of AI

Most state ethics instruments answer a narrow question: how do the conduct rules apply to generative AI, the chatbot-style tools that produce text on demand? Washington took a wider view. WSBA Advisory Opinion 2025-05, “Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Tools in Law Practice,” is a published advisory opinion of the Washington State Bar Association’s Committee on Professional Ethics, and its defining choice is the definition it adopts. Rather than confining itself to generative systems, the opinion deliberately addresses AI broadly, covering machine-learning tools, generative tools, agentic tools that act in sequences, and future autonomous tools that do not yet exist in common practice. That framing is rare. It means the opinion is built to apply to the next category of tool as readily as the current one, instead of needing a rewrite each time the technology shifts.

The practical payoff of that scope is durability. A firm that maps its policy to WSBA Advisory Opinion 2025-05 is mapping to a standard that already contemplates tools beyond today’s chatbots, including the agentic systems that string multiple actions together with limited human prompting. Only a handful of state instruments reach that far; California’s revised Practical Guidance is one, and Washington’s opinion is another. For a firm choosing which authority to build against, the breadth matters: the duties do not change when the tool changes.

It is worth labeling the instrument honestly. WSBA Advisory Opinion 2025-05 is an advisory ethics opinion, not a binding disciplinary rule. Washington’s lawyer-discipline system rests on the Rules of Professional Conduct; an advisory opinion interprets those rules but does not itself create new black-letter duties. The distinction affects citation weight, not the substance of the obligations, which flow from rules that already bind every Washington lawyer.

What the opinion requires

The duties WSBA Advisory Opinion 2025-05 sets out track the national consensus while applying it across that broader tool definition. Competence comes first: a lawyer must know the capabilities and the risks of any AI-enabled tool before using it in client work. That is not a one-time assessment; the duty follows the tool, and because the opinion covers categories beyond generative AI, the competence inquiry has to account for how a given system actually behaves, whether it predicts text, classifies data, or acts autonomously.

Verification is the second pillar. A lawyer must verify AI work product rather than relying on it. This is the anti-fabrication core that runs through every state instrument, and Washington states it plainly: output is a draft to be checked, not a result to be trusted. Confidentiality follows: a lawyer must protect information shared with AI tools, which requires understanding how a tool handles, retains, or exposes what is entered into it before any client information goes in.

Billing gets specific treatment. The opinion requires fair billing, with two concrete limits: a lawyer may not charge a client for time that AI saved, and may not pass through AI overhead costs to a client without consent. The first limit means efficiency gains belong to the client; the second means a firm cannot quietly convert its subscription costs into client charges. That analysis is consistent with ABA Formal Opinion 512 and with the fee positions taken across the state opinions. Finally, supervision: firms must supervise AI use across the practice, which in practice means a written, trained, and acknowledged policy rather than ad hoc tool adoption by individual lawyers. The policy template implements each of these duties, and the comparison table places Washington’s posture next to the other states.

What Washington lawyers should do now

Build to the opinion’s breadth, not just to its generative-AI examples. Concretely, that means an approved-tools register that records each tool’s type and its data-handling terms, because the confidentiality duty turns on how the specific tool treats inputs; a verification workflow that treats every AI output containing facts, citations, or analysis as a draft requiring independent confirmation; billing practices that charge only actual time and disclose any AI cost pass-through in advance; and firm-wide training with acknowledgment to satisfy the supervision duty. Because WSBA Advisory Opinion 2025-05 explicitly contemplates agentic and future autonomous tools, a Washington policy should not be scoped to chatbots alone; it should describe the firm’s approval process for any AI-enabled tool, whatever its category. The tracker lists the opinion with its honest type and date, and the changelog records any movement.

One layer the opinion does not address is the courts. Washington has no verified statewide court rule on AI in filings, so the obligations that exist at the courthouse are judge-by-judge standing orders rather than a uniform rule. A lawyer filing in Washington state or federal court should check the assigned judge’s standing orders before each filing, because a single judge may require disclosure or certification that the bar opinion does not. The court orders guide covers that per-filing check, and the disclosure comparison explains why a bar opinion and a court order are two different layers a Washington lawyer has to satisfy independently.