Part of our AI Regulation and Compliance News series

Briefing for attorneys

The Florida AI Filing Rule and June's Sanctions: What to Do Before Your Next Filing

Two things happened this month that change how careful Florida attorneys, and frankly attorneys everywhere, need to be when AI touches a court filing. On June 15, 2026, Florida's amended Rule 2.515 took effect, putting a verification certification on every paper you submit. And across the first eight days of June, federal courts handed down a run of sanctions over fake citations that should make anyone who skips the read-through nervous.

Here is the part the headlines keep missing. Neither development bans AI. Neither one asks you to stop using Claude or to disclose every tool you touched. What they ask for is something narrower and very doable: proof that you checked your work. This briefing covers what Rule 2.515 actually requires, what got lawyers sanctioned this month, and the pre-filing workflow that lets you keep the speed without putting your bar card at risk.

What Rule 2.515 actually requires

On May 28, 2026, the Florida Supreme Court amended Rule 2.515, the rule that governs the signing of court documents, and set it to take effect June 15, 2026 at 12:01 a.m. The amendment adds an explicit certification: when you sign a filing, you are certifying that you have read it and that the legal contentions and the authorities cited are warranted, accurate, and not fabricated. It reaches everyone who files, attorneys and self-represented litigants alike, and it carries the threat of sanctions for a false certification.

Read the rule closely and the practical shape becomes clear. It does not tell you which tools you may use. It does not require you to announce that a draft passed through an AI model. What it requires is that the cases you cite are real, that the quotes you attribute to them are accurate, and that the propositions you say they stand for are propositions they actually support. That is a standard most diligent lawyers already think they meet. The rule simply makes it a signed, enforceable representation.

Florida is not acting alone, but it is acting cleanly. Rather than leaving each judge to publish a separate standing order, the state created one uniform statewide standard. That is why this matters beyond Florida: it is the kind of rule other states copy. If you practice in Florida, it is binding now. If you do not, treat it as a preview. For the broader picture of how state and federal courts have been handling this, our companion piece on AI court rules across New York and Florida walks through the patchwork that Rule 2.515 starts to replace.

The June 2026 sanctions wave: what got lawyers in trouble

The rule landed in the same stretch as a cluster of sanctions that show what enforcement looks like when verification fails. This was not the early phase of a single judge scolding a single firm. It was appellate courts and a federal trial judge, in the same week, treating fabricated citations as serious misconduct.

On June 1, 2026, the 7th Circuit imposed a $5,000 fine under the federal appellate rules after a brief turned out to rest on AI-hallucinated authority. A week later, on June 8, a federal judge in the Northern District of Mississippi went further: she fined four lawyers, sums ranging from roughly $1,000 to $3,500, barred two of them from appearing for two years, and removed counsel from the case after they relied blindly on a tool that invented cases. Around the same window, the 6th and 9th Circuits issued their own sanctions and warnings about AI-fabricated briefs.

The common thread is the part worth internalizing. In each instance the problem was not that a model produced a wrong answer. Models do that; everyone knows it. The problem was that a licensed attorney signed and filed the output without checking it. Courts have started describing the duty to verify citations as nondelegable, which is a precise way of saying you cannot hand it to software and you cannot hand it to a junior associate and call it done. The signature is yours, and so is the verification. If you want the underlying mechanics of how these fabrications happen in the first place, our briefing on AI citation hallucinations in legal filings covers why confident-sounding fake cites appear and how to spot them.

The pre-filing AI-verification workflow

Here is the fix, and it is the reason a tool-fluent attorney has nothing to fear from either development. Rule 2.515 asks you to certify accuracy. The sanctioned lawyers failed to verify. Both point to the same small habit: a structured cite-check that runs before anything goes to the clerk. Build it once and it costs you minutes per filing.

Step one: pull every authority

Make a list of every case, statute, rule, and regulation the filing cites. Not a sample. Every one. AI tools fabricate selectively, so a spot-check is exactly how a fake citation survives. If your draft passed through a model, assume nothing about which cites are real until you have looked at each.

Step two: confirm it exists, in a real reporter

Open each authority in a primary source you trust: the official reporter, the court's own database, a paid research service. Confirm the case exists, that the citation points to it, and that the court and year match. A citation that does not resolve in a real database is the single clearest red flag, and it is the one that has ended careers this month.

Step three: confirm the quote and the holding

Existence is not enough. Read the passage you are relying on. Confirm the quote appears verbatim and that the case actually stands for the point you are using it to make. AI models will pair a real case with a holding it never reached. This step is where your legal judgment does the work no tool can do, and it is the work the certification is really asking you to sign for.

Log it. A short note in the file, who checked the cites and when, turns your certification into a defensible record rather than a hope. None of this slows real practice down in any meaningful way. It is the difference between using AI like a careful professional and using it like the lawyers who got removed from their case. If you want this built into a repeatable senior-review system rather than a checklist you might forget, that is exactly what we teach in The Leveraged Attorney: how to let AI draft while your verification and judgment stay firmly in your hands.

Competence and candor: the duties underneath the rule

Rule 2.515 and the June sanctions are not new ethics. They are old duties meeting a new tool. Your duty of competence has always included understanding the technology you use well enough to use it responsibly. Your duty of candor to the court has always forbidden citing authority you have not confirmed. AI did not create these obligations; it just made it easier to breach them quickly and at volume.

If you already verify your citations, the rule changes little except that the representation is now explicit. If you have been trusting AI output because it reads fluently and arrives fast, the rule and the sanctions say the same thing from two directions: fluency is not accuracy, and the court will hold you, the signer, to the difference. For a fuller treatment of where these duties bite, see our AI competence duty checklist for lawyers.

What to do now

If you file in Florida, the rule is live, so the move is immediate: add the three-step cite-check to your filing process this week and make sure anyone who drafts under your name knows the verification is not optional. If you file elsewhere, adopt the same workflow before your state writes its own version, because the direction of travel is obvious.

Then set the standard for your team. The nondelegable framing means a partner who signs is responsible for an associate's unverified cites. A short written protocol, every cited authority pulled and confirmed before filing, protects the people working under you as much as it protects you. Make AI part of the workflow openly, and make verification the non-negotiable last step.

What AI does not replace

It is worth being plain about the boundary. AI can draft a brief, summarize a record, and surface authorities faster than any associate. It cannot certify a filing. It cannot read a case and tell you, with a lawyer's judgment, whether it truly supports your argument or merely sounds like it might. It cannot stand behind your signature. Rule 2.515 makes that boundary a matter of court rule, and the June sanctions make it a matter of consequence. The verification step is not the part of the job AI took from you. It is the part that is now, more than ever, the value you bring.

Build the verification discipline into how you work

The attorneys who thrive with AI are not the fastest drafters. They are the ones whose verification is so reliable that speed never costs them accuracy. That discipline is teachable, and it is the spine of how we train senior lawyers to use these tools.

Learn the AI workflow built for attorneys: The Leveraged Attorney Join The Leverage Club for $49 and get the templates and protocols Not sure where to start? Take the 2-minute course finder

Sources: Jones Day, "Supreme Court of Florida Creates Statewide Standard for Artificial Intelligence Certification in Court Filings" (June 2026); LawNext, "Florida Supreme Court Tackles AI Hallucinations With New Rule" (May 2026); Mississippi Free Press, reporting on the Northern District of Mississippi sanctions and removal order (June 8, 2026); Bloomberg Law, "Ninth Circuit Warns of AI-Hallucinated Briefs in Sanctions Order" (June 2026); Casemine commentary on Rule 46 appellate sanctions and the nondelegable duty to verify (June 2026).