Wisconsin AI Ethics Rules for Lawyers

The official instruments

The ethics counsel’s column is the state’s instrument

Wisconsin’s most official statement on lawyers and generative AI ran in the bar’s magazine, in the column the bar publishes for exactly this purpose. Ethical Dilemma: Ethical Considerations When Using Generative Artificial Intelligence, by State Bar of Wisconsin ethics counsel Sarah E. Peterson, appeared in Wisconsin Lawyer at 97 Wis. Law. 29-32, in the issue dated October 4, 2024. The tracker admits it as guidance on the bar-staff precedent it has applied elsewhere, the Massachusetts bar counsel paper and New Hampshire’s board-reviewed committee series among them: official staff writing in an official channel counts, and counts honestly, as guidance rather than as a formal opinion. The distinction is not pedantry, because Wisconsin has no State Bar formal ethics opinion on AI in its EF series at all; a lawyer who cites the column as an opinion is citing something that does not exist, the error class our fabrications watch catalogs.

What Peterson’s analysis requires

The column reads Wisconsin’s Supreme Court Rules through ABA Formal Opinion 512, covering SCR 20:1.1 competence, 1.4 communication, 1.5 fees, 1.6 confidentiality, the 3.1, 3.3, and 8.4(c) honesty cluster, and 5.1 and 5.3 supervision. Generative AI is permitted, with technological competence as the ticket in. Output gets verified independently, never recycled through the tool that wrote it, before it reaches a court or a client, the discipline the sanctions survey prices. Confidential client information enters a self-learning tool only after informed consent, the analysis the Rule 1.6 breakdown details, and a client’s instruction not to use generative AI on the matter is honored, full stop, a client-autonomy point fewer states make explicit. Bills reflect actual time per the billing analysis, and firms adopt AI policies and training, the supervision architecture of the firm oversight rules that the policy template implements.

A standing order we can see but not yet read

The most consequential item in Wisconsin’s activity file sits in Waukesha County, where the circuit court announced Standing Order 26-SO-03-67 on the use of artificial intelligence in Family Division filings. The announcement is the issuing court’s own, which is why this page records the order at all; the posted order document, though, is an image scan whose text we have not yet extracted, so the order text is pending review and the order stays activity rather than an instrument, per the methodology rule that nothing is characterized from a document we could not read. Two more pieces of machinery are turning. A private petitioner, Jay Stone, filed a rule petition on artificial intelligence with the Wisconsin Supreme Court on February 19, 2026; it is docketed and pending, and because a private petition is a request for law rather than law, it is watched, not counted. And the Director of State Courts convened an AI Committee that first met September 23, 2025 to draft internal policy for the court system, per the judiciary’s Third Branch newsletter, bench-side work of the kind this dataset describes without admitting.

Practicing in the gap between a column and a rulebook

Until the Supreme Court acts on a petition or a court of appeals confronts AI squarely, Wisconsin lawyers work from the column plus the baseline, and the baseline is enough to practice safely. Verification before filing, everywhere, because Waukesha’s order shows trial courts are already moving. A confidentiality gate before any client fact reaches a tool. Actual-time billing, office policies, and training, with ABA Formal Opinion 512 as the national reasoning the column itself leans on. Judge-specific requirements can attach in any Wisconsin courtroom regardless of the statewide quiet, the check the court orders guide covers, and the changelog will record the week the Waukesha text verifies or the petition becomes something a lawyer can be disciplined under.