Ethics

ABA Formal Opinion 512, explained for solo attorneys

What ABA Formal Opinion 512 actually requires when you use generative AI in your practice — without the BigLaw jargon.

By The Draftiro team · Legal product· 9 min read·Published · Updated

In 2024 the ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility published Formal Opinion 512. It is the first national set of guideposts for using generative AI in a US law practice. Most coverage is written for BigLaw. If you are a solo or 2–3 person firm, this is what actually changes for you.

The five duties Op. 512 names

The opinion ties existing Model Rules to AI use. None of these duties are new. What is new is naming them out loud, in the context of a tool that can confidently invent a citation that does not exist.

  • Competence (Rule 1.1): Understand the AI tool you use, including its limits and the risk of hallucinated output. You do not need a CS degree; you need to know what the tool can get wrong.
  • Confidentiality (Rule 1.6): Do not feed client information into any tool that retains it for training without informed consent.
  • Communication (Rule 1.4): Disclose AI use to clients when it is reasonably necessary for them to make informed decisions — including in your engagement letter when AI is integral to the representation.
  • Supervision (Rules 5.1 and 5.3): Treat AI output the way you would treat a first-year associate's first draft. Verify, do not ratify.
  • Reasonable fees (Rule 1.5): If you save five hours of work with AI, you can charge for the AI-assisted hours you actually spent — but not for the five hours you saved.

What this means for your workflow on Monday

  1. Stop pasting client facts into ChatGPT's free consumer tier. The consumer tier may use your inputs to train. The Enterprise API tier is a different contract.
  2. Update your engagement letter. Add a short, plain-language disclosure: "I may use AI tools to draft and analyze documents in your matter. I review every output before relying on it."
  3. Verify every citation you file. A 2023 sanction against two New York lawyers for citing fictional cases generated by ChatGPT is the cautionary tale. Use a tool that grounds citations in a real database, or check them by hand.
  4. Track AI-assisted time honestly. If you write the brief in two hours with AI instead of seven without it, bill two — and let the AI-assisted entry show in your time tracker so the audit trail is clean.

Where Draftiro fits

Draftiro validates case citations against CourtListener, flags statutes and rules as "unchecked" so you know to verify them in your authority, appends an AI disclaimer to every assistant message, and auto-creates a billable time entry flagged "AI-assisted" for every AI exchange. Our default engagement-letter template includes the Op. 512 disclosure clause.

None of that replaces your professional judgment. It removes the busywork around the judgment.

Further reading

This article was published by the Draftiro team and reviewed by our attorney advisors. See our team and how we track AI ethics opinions.

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