Generative AI is very good at producing a paragraph that looks like a New Jersey brief. It is also very good at inventing a case that looks like a New Jersey case. The January 24, 2024 Preliminary Guidelines say this out loud: the systems can “hallucinate” and generate convincing, but false, information.
Convincing is the problem. False is the problem. Your signature is the problem.
What the 2026 notice requires, in words you can tape to a monitor
The March 2026 starter policy is more specific than a pep talk:
- No AI-assisted content goes to a client, opposing counsel, or the court without lawyer review and editing for accuracy and validity.
- You also review before you rely on it internally.
- Any case law, statute, rule, quotation, or pinpoint citation in an AI-assisted draft must be verified by law firm personnel using an official source before it is relied on or filed.
- If a citation cannot be verified, it must be removed.
- Other material factual assertions, procedural descriptions, record references, and client-specific statements generated with AI must be checked too.
Official source means the reporter, the court’s site, the statute database you already trust, the rule book. It does not mean “the chatbot cited it twice.” It does not mean a blog, including this one. It does not mean a screenshot of a Google result that also hallucinated.
Candor is not optional because the intern used a tool
RPC 3.3 (candor toward the tribunal) is on the Court’s short list in that same template, next to competence and confidentiality. So are RPC 3.1 (non-frivolous basis) and the honesty rules in RPC 4.1 and 8.4, which the 2024 guidelines already folded into this conversation. You do not get a new defense called “the model was confident.”
National cautionary tales exist. I am not going to recap another state’s sanctions order as if it were a New Jersey holding. The holding you have at home is simpler: if it is in the brief, you own it.
A filing checklist that is almost insultingly plain
- Generate the draft, if you must, in a tool that matches your confidentiality rule.
- Print the table of authorities, or make one.
- Open each authority in an official source. Read the page you cited. If the quote is wrong, fix it. If the case does not exist, delete it and go sit down.
- Check that the proposition you attributed to the case is actually what the case said, in New Jersey, in the year you claimed.
- Have a second lawyer or a very stubborn paralegal do the same pass when the filing is not a three-page letter.
- Only then do you serve, file, or hit send.
If that feels slower than the chatbot, you have located the actual cost of using the chatbot. Speed without the checklist is how firms end up explaining themselves to a judge who has a copy of the real reporter.
What AI is still good for, once you are this boring
Outlines. Reverse outlines of your own draft. “Explain this statute as if I am tired.” A list of issues you might have missed, which you then research yourself. Turning your dictated notes into a cleaner chronology, after you have already taken the names out. None of that requires a fabricated Appellate Division caption.
I will keep writing in this series about attorney AI use in New Jersey: supervision of staff, billing when the draft took twelve minutes, and how a private document system differs from a public tab. If you want help building the private version on site, that is Bonnie Law Consulting. If you want a court form, that is still Plum Packet, and still not a robot.
The garden metaphor writes itself and I am going to let it. Weeds look like flowers from two rooms away. You still have to walk up to the bed.