At the Florida Bar Convention in Orlando on June 17, two veteran judges delivered an unequivocal message about the duty of competence and lawyers’ use of AI. U.S. Magistrate Judge Nicholas Mizell and Florida Deputy Chief Judge of Compensation Claims David Langham co-presented the Standing Committee on Technology’s 2026 Symposium, “Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity, and the Ethics of Lawyering in a Digital Age.”
According to them, the duty of competence under Rule 1.1 now includes understanding AI. As Judge Mizell put it, every lawyer has “a basic requirement to competency,” and understanding how these tools work is part of meeting that obligation. Judge Langham went further, telling the audience they have a responsibility to go back to their communities and spread the word: “You owe it to yourselves and you owe it to the profession.”
The Florida Supreme Court recently amended Rule 2.515 to require attorneys and self-represented litigants to certify that legal authorities cited in filings are accurate — a direct response to AI hallucinations finding their way into court documents. The rule took effect June 15 and authorizes judges to impose sanctions for non-compliance. A similar proposal is pending in the federal Middle District of Florida.
The discussion included what one Florida Judge thought was the most egregious AI lawyering failure of the past year, Senior U.S. District Judge Sharion Aycock in the Northern District of Mississippi imposed sweeping sanctions on a law firm after a junior attorney repeatedly filed documents riddled with AI hallucinations. The judge ordered the firm’s partners to personally audit every document that lawyer had filed since joining the firm. Partners are responsible for what their people do — and that cuts both ways on AI.
The tool that lawyer was using? Grok. As Langham quipped, it was “like citing Mad Magazine in your briefs.”
It’s our hope that, in the future, we will have robust training programs available statewide to help lawyers use AI to better serve our clients, and that these early pitfalls simply become a relic of the past. In the meantime, the barrier to entry to get started is low. There are excellent enterprise-level AI tools available today that are affordable, easy to use, and many are built with data privacy protections. There is no bad time to start learning. Whether you’ve been curious and cautious, or you’ve been actively avoiding this conversation, the judges in Florida are right: the tools are here, they’re changing how law is practiced, and the profession has an obligation to keep up.
