NYC Bar Association Calls for National AI Framework — Sanctions Cases Mount

The New York City Bar Association's Emerging Companies & Venture Capital Committee published a 21-jurisdiction policy paper on August 12, concluding that the decentralized patchwork of state bar opinions, judicial standing orders, and task force reports produces uneven clarity that is increasingly untenable. The paper documents the stakes of non-compliance: in Mata v. Avianca, a federal judge sanctioned a lawyer for hallucinated ChatGPT citations; in Wadsworth v. Walmart Inc. (February 2025), Morgan & Morgan lawyers were sanctioned for a motion containing eight fabricated citations from the firm's in-house AI platform. The NYC Bar calls for a national framework built on the MRPC that preserves state interpretive authority while establishing baseline obligations, and recommends that every firm designate a technology ethics officer now. For mid-sized firms navigating multiple jurisdictions, the six-principle framework — Understand, Verify, Protect, Supervise, Communicate, Be Truthful — offers a governance scaffold that maps onto existing professional responsibility infrastructure without requiring new legal departments.