Effective June 1, New York lawyers will be required to navigate a new rule governing the use of artificial intelligence technology by attorneys and parties who submit papers to New York state courts. In local jurisdictions that adopt the rule, all litigators who rely – or plan to rely – on generative AI tools to draft pleadings, prepare for depositions, and conduct motion practice will need to be especially vigilant that their work is free from hallucinated citations and fabrications of fact.
New Part 161. Use of Artificial Intelligence Technology strikes a permissive but accountability-focused posture. Attorneys may use AI tools to assist with court submissions, and no mandatory system-wide disclosure obligation attaches to that use. But Part 161 makes plain that an attorney who signs an AI-assisted court paper owns every word on the page – hallucinated citations and fabricated facts included. That requirement alone will reshape how New York lawyers prepare for, conduct, and summarize depositions for the indefinite future.
Part 161 makes plain that an attorney who signs an AI-assisted court paper owns every word on the page — hallucinated citations and fabricated facts included.
What Part 161 Does
Part 161 provides that “[e]very attorney or party who uses an artificial intelligence (AI) tool in preparing any paper submitted to this court is expected to understand that tool’s capabilities and limitations.”
“Artificial intelligence” is defined as:
a machine-based system that can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, make predictions, recommendations, or decisions influencing real or virtual environments, and that uses machine- and human-based inputs to perceive real and virtual environments, abstract such perceptions into models through analysis in an automated manner, and use model inference to formulate options for information or action.
The term “paper” means:
a brief, memorandum, affidavit, affirmation, pleading, or other document prepared by an attorney or party for submission to a court.
“Paper” that constitutes evidence is not governed by Part 161 because, as the rule explains, evidentiary matters are addressed in other rules. Nevertheless, it’s clear that Part 161’s reach is broad.
Modern litigators routinely turn to generative AI for first drafts of briefs, summary-judgment memoranda, and discovery motions. Under Part 161, every signature on a motion functions as a quality-control checkpoint. A lawyer who relies on artificial intelligence tools to research a novel argument cannot offload the responsibility for verification to a junior associate, a vendor, or the algorithm itself.
This allocation of responsibility ties Part 161 directly to two longstanding sources of a New York attorney’s duty to the court. The first, 22 NYCRR Sec. 130-1.1, defines as “frivolous” any conduct that “asserts material factual statements that are false,” and authorizes courts to impose monetary sanctions for violations. The second duty is an ethical one. Rule 3.3 of the New York Rules of Professional Conduct forbids a lawyer from knowingly making “a false statement of fact or law to a tribunal” and obliges remediation when the lawyer later learns of the falsity. Hallucinated cases and invented quotations appear to sit squarely within both prohibitions.
Regarding depositions specifically, Part 161 will impact virtually every step of deposition practice. Today, vendors offer products that draft questioner outlines, identify weaknesses in case theories, summarize discovery productions, conduct background checks on witnesses, perform sentiment analyses, and produce post-deposition summaries running alongside the official transcript. The number and variety of AI tools that ease deposition preparation are continually growing.
A large portion of the deposition-related work performed by AI tools – e.g., drafting deposition outlines, formulating questions, flagging inconsistencies and impeachment material, summarizing deposition transcripts – would seem to fall outside Part 161’s certification obligation because they are being used purely as attorney work product. But the moment that AI work product reaches the court in a pleading, the signing attorney’s verification duty attaches in full.
Individual judges in local New York jurisdictions retain the discretion to adopt their own rules on artificial intelligence, adopt the model rule contained in Part 161, or adopt no rule whatsoever. The model rule provides that attorneys whose pleadings contain hallucinations or fabricated facts will face sanctions or other remedial action.
Takeaways for New York Litigators
Three practical lessons emerge for litigators.
First, a New York lawyer’s signature on any court paper – motion, affirmation, memorandum, or pleading – carries an affirmative certification that every AI-generated factual statement and legal citation has been independently verified.
Second, the work-product status of AI-assisted deposition preparation depends on where the output ultimately goes. Material not filed with the court enjoys the same protections as any other work product.
Third, the interaction among Part 161, Section 130-1.1, and Rule 3.3 creates overlapping enforcement avenues. A single AI-generated falsehood in a New York pleading may yield a court sanction, a frivolous-conduct fee award, a bar discipline complaint, and a malpractice exposure, all from the same paper. New York lawyers who incorporate artificial intelligence tools into their litigation practices should treat Part 161 as a reminder that delegation to a machine never delegates legal and ethical duties.
Attorneys wanting to dive deeper into the legal and ethical ramifications of artificial intelligence and digital technologies may wish to review Recent Trends And Developments In Artificial Intelligence And Digital Technologies, published last month by the New York City Bar’s Presidential Task Force on Artificial Intelligence and Digital Technologies.
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