Judges' Standing Orders on AI in Court Filings

AI standing orders are instructions that individual judges, and sometimes whole courts, issue to control how filers use generative AI in documents submitted to the court. They spread quickly in 2023 after Mata v. Avianca in the Southern District of New York. In that case, lawyers filed a brief citing court decisions that ChatGPT had made up, and the judge sanctioned them in June 2023. Shortly before that ruling, Judge Brantley Starr of the Northern District of Texas began requiring attorneys to file a certificate. It had to state either that no generative AI was used to draft the filing or that a human had checked any AI-drafted language for accuracy against print reporters or traditional legal databases. The orders fall into a few groups. Certification orders, like Starr's, ask the filer to confirm that a person verified the content. Disclosure orders require filers to say whether they used AI, and sometimes which tool and for what. Judge Michael Baylson of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania issued a June 2023 order that covered any use of AI, and critics pointed out that this could include ordinary research tools with AI features. Some orders are narrow and focus only on citation accuracy. Others deal with confidentiality and warn against putting sealed or protected material into public tools. Still others simply remind filers that existing rules apply. One common misconception is that these orders created a new duty. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11 already requires that legal contentions be supported by existing law and that the person signing made a reasonable inquiry, and state courts have similar rules. For that reason, some courts decided AI-specific rules were unnecessary. The Fifth Circuit, for example, considered an AI certification rule and declined to adopt it in 2024. A second misconception is that there is one national standard. Requirements vary, so compliance means checking the judge's individual practices, the local rules and any case-specific orders before every filing. Courts have kept sanctioning fabricated citations under ordinary rules, whether or not an AI order exists.