New Jersey (statewide): New Jersey Supreme Court Notice to the Bar: Preliminary Guideline…

Scope

These guidelines apply to all licensed New Jersey attorneys. New Jersey was the first state in the nation to issue formal court-side AI guidance for the bar, and the guidelines remain the governing statewide framework for attorney AI use in NJ matters.

What the guidelines require

The Notice was issued January 25, 2024, with a follow-up notice in June 2024 responding to comments from the bar. The guidelines anchor AI obligations to the New Jersey Rules of Professional Conduct rather than imposing a separate disclosure-and-certification regime:

1. Competence (RPC 1.1): Lawyers must understand the capabilities and limitations of AI tools they use. Treating AI output as authoritative without understanding how it was generated is a competence violation.
2. Confidentiality (RPC 1.6): Privileged or confidential client information must not be uploaded to AI systems that would compromise it. Public consumer AI products generally fail this test; enterprise products with appropriate data-handling agreements may not.
3. Verification: Independent attorney verification of AI-generated work product is required before client delivery or court filing. The Mata v. Avianca pattern of fabricated citations reaching a court is, in New Jersey, primarily a verification-failure problem.
4. Bias awareness: Lawyers must understand and address algorithmic bias in their AI tools.
5. Client communication: Disclosure to clients may be required when AI use is material to the engagement, particularly where AI affects fees, work product quality, or the client’s data handling.

What the guidelines do not impose

The New Jersey guidelines deliberately do not require:

• Disclosure of AI use in court filings.
• A separate certification block on briefs.
• A categorical ban on any class of AI tools.

The reasoning, set out in the guidelines themselves, is that the existing RPCs already address competence, confidentiality, supervision, and candor; layering a procedural disclosure rule risks substituting form for substance. New Jersey’s approach is closer to the Illinois model than the Florida circuit-court model.

Practitioner workflow

For New Jersey state-court matters, no disclosure block is required in filings. Firms should document an internal AI use policy that addresses each of the five RPC-based obligations above, retain records of training and verification steps, and ensure their AI tooling supports the confidentiality posture required by RPC 1.6 (i.e., not consumer ChatGPT for client information).

The June 2024 follow-up notice responds to bar comments and clarifies several points without changing the underlying obligations. Both notices should be read together.

Primary source

Notice (Jan 25, 2024): https://www.njcourts.gov/sites/default/files/notices/2024/01/n240125a.pdf

Follow-up Notice (Jun 12, 2024): https://www.njcourts.gov/sites/default/files/notices/2024/06/n240612a.pdf

Landing page: https://www.njcourts.gov/attorneys/artificial-intelligence-use-courts