N.D. Ill.: Artificial Intelligence Standing Order (Magistrate Judge Jeffrey N. Cole, N.D…

Status

The order has lapsed: Magistrate Judge Cole retired on May 6, 2025, and no order withdrew it. The court’s General Order 25-0009 records the retirement and reassigns his pending miscellaneous cases to Presiding Magistrate Judge M. David Weisman; General Order 25-0008 reassigns his civil consent cases to Magistrate Judge Albert Berry III, who entered on duty May 7, 2025. A chambers standing order governs only the cases before the judge who issued it, so this order no longer operates, and the court no longer posts it. Practitioners in the Northern District of Illinois should look to the current chambers rules of the assigned judge (see the other N.D. Ill. entries in this tracker). The entry is kept because the order was one of the first federal AI filing rules and is still listed in the Ropes & Gray tracker.

What the order required

Magistrate Judge Cole’s standing order was among the earliest federal-court AI rules (July 2023). It paired disclosure (the filer had to disclose AI use in the filing itself) with verification (the filer’s certification represented that they had read and analyzed all cited authorities to ensure they exist) and an explicit Rule 11 anchor (reliance on AI does not satisfy the reasonable-inquiry standard).

The order was unusual among 2023-vintage AI rules in three ways. First, it explicitly addressed the “reasonable inquiry” prong of Rule 11, anticipating the Mata v. Avianca framing that became dominant. Second, it required a representation that cited authorities had been “read and analyzed,” not merely “verified” or “checked,” establishing a higher diligence standard. Third, it swept any AI use (“AI” without a “generative” qualifier) rather than limiting itself to generative AI specifically.

The PDF metadata shows the file was generated July 20, 2023 in Corel WordPerfect, corroborating the Ropes & Gray tracker’s 2023-07-21 attribution as the operative signing date.

Quotable language

“Any party using AI in the preparation of materials submitted to the court must disclose in the filing that an AI tool was used to conduct legal research and/or was used in any way in the preparation of the submitted document.”

“Parties should not assume that mere reliance on an AI tool will be presumed to constitute reasonable inquiry.”

Sources

The first item is the text of the order (an archive capture; no live court copy exists, so no primary-source citation is offered). The rest document the judge’s retirement and the reassignment of his cases.

• Text of the Artificial Intelligence Standing Order, Internet Archive capture of the retired ilnd.uscourts.gov path (2026-06-26)
• General Order 25-0009, reassignment of Magistrate Judge Cole’s miscellaneous cases on his retirement, ilnd.uscourts.gov
• General Order 25-0008, initial calendar of Magistrate Judge Albert Berry III (civil consent cases reassigned from Magistrate Judge Cole), ilnd.uscourts.gov
• Magistrate Judge Cole biography page, ilnd.uscourts.gov