Eric Ufomadu (Stetson University) has posted The Undischargeable Duty: Attorney Verification of Legal AI and the Case for Reliance Disclosures on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
The legal profession has answered the arrival of generative AI with a single instruction: verify. ABA Formal Opinion 512 requires “an appropriate degree of independent verification or review”; state bar opinions and more than twenty-five federal standing orders say the same in different words. This article argues that the instruction, as applied to retrieval-augmented legal research tools, is presently undischargeable: the duty it states cannot be performed, because performing it requires information about how a given tool fails, namely its error composition, its detectability characteristics, its temporal coverage, and its silent design behaviors, that only vendors possess and no vendor discloses. The argument is doctrinal, not empirical: professional duties presuppose epistemic access to the facts that make compliance possible, and where a duty’s informational preconditions are controlled by a third party, the duty propagates into a demand on that party. The article’s constructive half specifies the demand. It derives, requirement by requirement from the law of lawyering, a documentation artifact, the Reliance Card, stating what a legal AI vendor must disclose for an attorney’s use of the tool to be capable of satisfying Rules 1.1, 3.3, and 5.3. A qualitative gap analysis against the public record shows that no current commercial tool satisfies any tier of the specification. The article contributes to legal scholarship a systematized impossibility argument with a doctrinal mechanism for resolving it, and to computer science a documentation standard in the lineage of Model Cards whose fields are derived not from ethical aspiration but from enforceable professional obligation, a derivation method portable to medicine, engineering, and every other profession whose members are now being told to verify.
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