New AI court rules in New York and Florida. Here is the checklist.

What the two states actually did

In June 2026, two of the biggest legal markets in the country put dated, binding rules on the books about how attorneys use AI in their work.

New York's Unified Court System adopted a formal rule governing attorney use of AI, effective June 1, 2026, as reported by the New York State Bar Association. The Florida Supreme Court amended its rules the same month to address AI in court filings, creating a statewide certification standard. The reporting on it was direct: Florida joins New York. Two large jurisdictions, two binding rules, both arriving in the same window.

The reason to treat this as a real change and not background noise is volume. Between them, New York and Florida cover an enormous share of US litigation. If you practice in either, or file pro hac vice into either, the rules are now part of your filing procedure whether or not you have read them. This briefing is about the procedure they require, not about the broader debate over whether AI belongs in legal work.

What these rules require of you, in practice

Strip away the framing and both rules point at the same operational thing: an attorney is responsible for what they file, and that responsibility now explicitly covers anything an AI tool touched on the way to the filing.

A certification standard, like Florida's, means you are attesting to something at the point of filing. That attestation only holds if you have actually done the work behind it. A formal use rule, like New York's, sets an expectation for how the tool is handled inside your practice. Neither one is satisfied by good intentions. They are satisfied by a verification step you can point to.

So the practical reading is narrow and useful. You are not being asked to stop using AI. You are being asked to be able to stand behind every line of a filing, including the parts a tool helped produce, the same way you already stand behind a filing a junior associate drafted. The rule formalizes a duty you already had. The job now is to make that duty a routine instead of a hope.

The pre-filing checklist that covers both

Here is a short, written procedure you can run on any filing that involved an AI tool. It is built to satisfy the New York rule and the Florida certification standard at the same time.

• Verify every cited authority against the record. For each case, statute, or rule cited, pull the actual source and confirm it exists, says what the filing claims it says, and is still good law. No exceptions, no "it sounds right."
• Confirm every quotation and pin cite. If the filing quotes an authority, match the quote and the page or paragraph cite to the source text directly.
• Check the factual assertions against your file. Anything stated as fact gets traced back to a document, a transcript, or a record citation you actually have.
• Confirm you can attest to it. Before you sign, ask whether you could defend each element of the filing to the court if asked tomorrow. If the answer is no for any line, it does not go out.
• Keep a record of the check. Note who ran the verification and when. Under a certification standard, being able to show your process is part of the protection.

That is the whole thing. It is not long, and most of it is what a careful litigator already does on instinct. The change is making it explicit and running it every time, not just when a filing feels risky.

Why the verification step is the load-bearing one

Of those steps, one carries the most weight: checking every cited authority against the actual record before you sign. It is the step that both rules are really built around, because it is the point where a tool's output stops being a draft and becomes something you are vouching for.

The reason this step matters so much is covered in depth on a separate page. If you want the full account of why AI-generated citations need to be verified one by one, read How to stop AI citation hallucinations. That page owns the why. This one stays on the what-to-do.

The practical move is to make verification a gate, not a suggestion. A filing with an unverified citation is not "almost done." It is not done. Treating it that way is what turns a written rule into an actual habit, and an actual habit is what the court rules are now asking you to have.

Fitting it into how you already work

None of this requires new software or a policy overhaul. It requires a place in your existing close-out routine for one more checklist, run on any filing an AI tool helped produce.

If you also want the upstream piece, knowing what is safe to put into an AI tool in the first place, that is a related but separate question, and it has its own page: What is safe to put into AI. The two fit together. Confidentiality governs what goes in. The verification checklist governs what comes out and gets filed.

The honest caveat is that rules like these evolve, and the specifics in any given court can shift. Treat the checklist as the durable core and check your local court's current language before you rely on it for a specific filing.

The skill under the rules

Court rules will keep changing, and new states will keep joining. Chasing each one as it lands is a losing game. What does not change is the underlying skill: a disciplined method for using AI in your practice where you stay in front of the output and can stand behind every word you file.

That method outlasts any single rule, because it was the right way to work before the rules were written and it will satisfy the next rule before you have read it. If you want the structured version built for practicing litigators, The Leveraged Attorney teaches it from the ground up, and the two minute course quiz will point you to the right starting place for your practice.