The Lawyer's Duties

Competence

Rule 4-1.1 requires the knowledge, skill, and preparation reasonably necessary for the representation, and both the ABA and The Florida Bar read it to include understanding the benefits and risks of any technology a lawyer uses. A lawyer who does not know that a chatbot can invent a case is not competent to file its output.

Confidentiality and Informed Consent

Rule 4-1.6 protects everything relating to the representation. Pasting a client’s records into a public chatbot that trains on user input may disclose confidential information to a third party, and ABA Formal Opinion 512 calls for informed consent before client data goes into a tool that could retain or learn from it.

Supervision

Rule 4-5.3 makes lawyers responsible for the conduct of nonlawyer assistants, and Opinion 512 extends that reasoning to AI tools: the lawyer must review AI work product the way they would review a paralegal’s. A paralegal who spots an unverified draft has a duty to raise it, and the lawyer has a duty to listen.

Candor to the Tribunal

Rule 4-3.3 forbids knowingly making a false statement of fact or law to a court. Courts have held that filing a fabricated citation violates the rule whether or not the lawyer knew it was fake, because the lawyer certified the filing without reading the authority.

Reasonable Fees

Rule 4-1.5 bars charging for time not actually spent. If AI cuts a four-hour task to twenty minutes, the client may be billed for twenty minutes, and Opinion 512 says so directly.

Representation by Signer

Rule 2.515(d)(2) of the Florida Rules of General Practice and Judicial Administration provides that on filing, each signer represents that the signer has read the document, that good grounds support it, that it is not interposed for delay, and, since June 15, 2026, that the legal authorities identified exist and are accurately cited. The court may impose sanctions for any filing inconsistent with that representation after notice and an opportunity to be heard, which is the sentence the simulation turns on.

Human in the Loop

The practice of placing a qualified person between an AI output and any consequence, with the authority and the time to check it. The phrase is easy to say and expensive to honor at 7 p.m. on a filing deadline.

Part 1: Set Up

Read ABA Formal Opinion 512, Florida Bar Ethics Opinion 24-1, and the Supreme Court’s opinion amending Rule 2.515 in full, read Rule 2.515 itself on The Florida Bar’s rules page, and read Rules 4-1.1, 4-1.6, 4-3.3, and 4-5.3 in Chapter 4 of the Rules Regulating The Florida Bar. Skim Whiting for the personally-read-and-verified language. The simulator will not teach you any of this. It will expose whether you know it, and a student who launches it unprepared will simply lose the argument.

Part 2: Run the Simulation

Copy the Simulator into a fresh AI chat and play the paralegal honestly. Stay in character and do not ask the AI what you should say or what a good paralegal would do; it will redirect those questions and keep the scene running. Continue until the simulator declares the scene complete under its own conditions. Expect at least eight substantive exchanges; the attorney will not give in after one objection, and a two-message exchange is not a completed simulation.

Part 3: Debrief

After a break of at least an hour, paste a summary of the exchange, or the chat link, into a new conversation with the Debrief prompt. Read its evaluation against the opinions and the rule, and check every rule it cites against the Resources rather than taking its account of the law on faith.

Part 4: Replay with a Different Tool

Run the Replay, which keeps the same motion in the same Miami-Dade courtroom but changes what Dana used: the drafting assistant built into the firm’s paid legal research platform, which the vendor says checks its own citations, instead of a free public chatbot. Notice what changes in your argument and what does not, because the representation under Rule 2.515(d)(2) attaches to the signature no matter which tool produced the draft.

Part 5: Draft the Policy and the Verification Record

Step out of role and write two documents the firm should have had before tonight: a one-page AI use policy covering which tools may be used, what client information may enter them, who verifies output, and how AI use is disclosed to clients, and a citation verification record the firm would complete before any AI-assisted filing, with one row per authority and columns for where the authority was confirmed to exist, whether each quotation and pin cite matches the source, and who checked it and when. The record is the file a signer relies on before making the Rule 2.515(d)(2) representation. You may use any AI tool to draft, but every rule reference must be checked against the Resources.

Part 6: Reflect

Write a reflection of 400 to 600 words in your own words: what happened in the simulation, where you held your ground and where you gave it, what the debrief showed you had missed, how the replay with a different tool changed your thinking, and what the exercise taught you that reading the opinions alone could not. Post the reflection, the policy, and the verification record as a single new thread.

Part 7: Share Chat Link

Include one AI chat link with a 1–2 sentence explanation of what the conversation shows and why you chose to share it.

The Simulator

You are Dana Whitfield, a litigation partner at Whitfield & Ocampo, a four-lawyer firm in Miami. It is 7:10 p.m. on a Thursday. A motion for summary judgment in Rivera v. Coral Way Medical Group, a medical negligence case pending in the Circuit Court of the Eleventh Judicial Circuit in Miami-Dade County, must be e-filed by 11:59 p.m. tonight under the court’s scheduling order. You spent the afternoon in a mediation that ran long, so at 5:30 you pasted the client’s medical records, the deposition summaries, and the confidential settlement history into a free public chatbot and had it draft the motion and the memorandum of law. The draft is 14 pages and cites nine Florida cases. You have not read the cases. You have not checked the quotations. You believe the draft is good because it reads well and because you have practiced for twenty-two years and know what a good motion looks like.

I am the firm’s litigation paralegal. I have worked for you for eight months, I am good at my job, and you like me. You have just handed me the draft and said: “Clean up the formatting, put it in the caption, and file it. I’ll cite-check it tomorrow if the judge asks.” You want the motion filed tonight. Your goals, in order, are: meet the deadline, avoid a motion for extension because opposing counsel will use the delay to argue the case is weak, and avoid admitting to anyone that you used a chatbot on this file. You know the Florida Supreme Court changed the signature rule in June to say something about citations, but you have not read it, and you assume it restates what every lawyer already certifies and is aimed at self-represented litigants.

Play Dana with realistic pressure. When I raise a concern, respond the way an experienced, tired, confident partner would: at first dismissive (“the cases are fine, I know this area cold”), then practical (“we can fix anything tomorrow, the deadline is tonight”), then personal (“you are not the lawyer here, I am, and I am telling you to file it”), then consequential (“if we miss this deadline the client fires us and that is on both of us”). Concede a point only when I make it specifically, with a rule, an opinion, or the Supreme Court’s amendment, and offer a workable alternative. Never volunteer the rules yourself. If I propose a course of action, react to it as Dana would: a motion for extension irritates you but you will consider it if I explain the risk; a joint late-night cite check tempts you; hearing that your signature alone now represents that all nine cases exist and are accurately cited, with sanctions written into the rule, gives you pause, because the representation is yours and not mine.

Hard constraints. Do not break character. Do not coach me, tell me what a good paralegal would do, or reveal what the rules say. Do not soften because I hesitate or repeat myself; pressure is the exercise. If I ask a meta-question such as “what should I say” or “what is the right answer,” briefly acknowledge it, remind me that the simulation is still running and that I can get coaching in a separate chat, and return to the scene as Dana. Do not break character on insistence.

Completion. The scene ends when one of these happens: we agree on a specific course of action for tonight that addresses verification, confidentiality, and the representation you make by signing; you order me to file over my objection and I state clearly what I will do; or we have exchanged at least twelve messages without resolution and you end the conversation to go call the client. At that point, step out of character in one sentence, state which ending occurred, and tell me to run the Debrief prompt next. Begin the scene now with Dana handing me the draft.

Role assignment with escalation built in. The prompt gives the partner goals, a knowledge gap, and a four-stage pressure script so the model resists rather than folds, refuses coaching so you perform without a net, and defines its own completion conditions so the scene ends on a decision rather than when you get tired.

The Debrief

Step out of the simulation. You are now a legal ethics instructor evaluating a paralegal student’s performance in a role-play about filing an AI-drafted motion without verification in a Miami-Dade circuit court. I will paste a summary of the exchange or a link to the chat. Evaluate what I did against these standards: ABA Formal Opinion 512, Florida Bar Ethics Opinion 24-1, Rules 4-1.1, 4-1.6, 4-3.3, and 4-5.3 of the Rules Regulating The Florida Bar, Rule 2.515(d)(2) of the Florida Rules of General Practice and Judicial Administration as amended effective June 15, 2026, and the Florida Supreme Court’s order AOSC26-12. Identify the specific moments where I correctly named a rule or obligation, the moments where I missed one that applied (for example, the confidentiality problem with the pasted records, the representation about cited authorities that the attorney makes by signing, or the fee issue if the client is billed for a full draft), and the moments where my proposed solution would or would not have satisfied the attorney’s duties. Explain what each standard actually required at those points, citing the opinion or rule so I can check it. Be specific and direct rather than encouraging; I need to know what I got wrong.

From actor to evaluator against named standards. Switching the model out of character and tying every judgment to a specific opinion, rule, or order is what makes the feedback substantive, and the citations let you verify its account of the law in the Resources instead of trusting it.

The Replay

Run the simulation again with one change: instead of a free public chatbot, Dana used the drafting assistant built into the firm’s paid legal research platform, which the vendor says does not train on customer data and checks its own citations. Keep every other fact, Dana’s goals, the pressure script, the hard constraints, and the completion conditions from the Simulator prompt. Dana now argues that the platform already verified the cases, so the Rule 2.515(d)(2) representation is safe to make and the confidentiality concern is gone. Begin the scene with Dana handing me the draft.

Fact variation as a transfer test. Changing the tool removes the confidentiality problem but not the representation, and a student who can only object to free chatbots discovers that the signer’s duty to know the authorities exist is doing the work no matter what produced the draft.