The Signature: Competence, Candor, and the Partner at 7 p.m.

A petition that cited what was not there

In June 2026, a lawyer asked Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeal to review a trial judge’s order in a Palm Beach County lawsuit. The petition told the court that it had repeatedly reviewed and granted petitions like this one, and it cited cases to prove the point. One of them, supposedly a Fourth District decision, did not exist. Others did not say what the petition claimed. The court could not have granted the petition anyway, because settled law put the order beyond its reach. On June 30 it dismissed the petition and ordered the lawyer to show cause why sanctions should not follow.

That order, posted on the court’s docket (opens in a new tab), listed the false citations and gave the lawyer ten days to explain how each citation, quotation, and legal proposition had been confirmed before filing. What had the lawyer promised by signing the petition, and what does that promise require when a machine writes the first draft? This reading follows JMOR Properties, LLC v. Artist Alley Townhomes, LLC from the petition to the court’s decision, because the case answers both questions. The activity then tests those answers in a partner’s office at 7:10 p.m., where the signature on the motion is the partner’s and the order to file it is yours.

What a signature promises

Every document filed in a Florida court carries a signature, and the signature says something. Under Florida Rule of General Practice and Judicial Administration 2.515(d)(2), each signer represents that the signer has read the document, that good grounds support it, and that it is not interposed for delay. That is the representation by signer. It binds a self-represented party exactly as it binds a lawyer, and it never asks how the document was written. It asks whether the person who signed can stand behind it.

In May 2026 the Florida Supreme Court added a fourth promise. Acting on its own motion, it amended the rule so that every signer also represents that the legal authorities identified in the filing exist and are accurately cited. It wrote sanctions into the rule as well, from a reprimand to dismissal of the case, after notice and a chance to be heard. The Court’s opinion (opens in a new tab) explains why. AI tools now help draft and research court filings, and they can produce content that looks plausible and is false, including authorities no court ever wrote. The amendment took effect on June 15, 2026.

The same day, the Court told Florida’s courts to stop asking for more. Several judicial circuits had adopted their own orders requiring filers to disclose when they used AI, and AOSC26-12 (opens in a new tab) replaced that patchwork with the one statewide rule. No Florida state court may now require a filer to name the tool. What every signer owes is the check.

Was the fourth promise new? The Sixth District has said it was not. In Davidson v. Chang-Warner, No. 6D2025-1678 (Fla. 6th DCA June 26, 2026) (opens in a new tab), it applied the amended rule to a brief filed before the amendment took effect. The amended rule, the court wrote, “explicitly states what rule 2.515(d)(2) already required.” A signer who had read a brief and vouched for good grounds had always vouched for the cases in it. The lawyers in Mata v. Avianca, Inc., 678 F. Supp. 3d 443 (S.D.N.Y. 2023) (opens in a new tab) learned the same lesson in a federal court with no AI rule at all. The court said the existing rules made lawyers the gatekeepers of their filings’ accuracy, and it sanctioned them under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11, which makes a signature a certification.

The draft filed by mistake

The lawyer’s response to the show-cause order admitted the false citations, identified more of them, and accepted responsibility. It also offered an explanation. The lawyer’s usual process, the response said, was to have AI software research and draft the first version, then verify every citation and revise. The response said that was done here too, but that during final edits the lawyer worked from the wrong file, so the AI’s first draft was the one filed. It attached the corrected petition that should have gone in.

On August 12, 2026, the court referred the lawyer to The Florida Bar (opens in a new tab). It restated the rule from recent Florida decisions: a lawyer may be sanctioned for citing authority that does not exist, and also for citing real cases for propositions they do not support. Then it held that submitting the wrong draft did not excuse the failure to verify the accuracy of every citation in the filing, and it cited the new subdivision (D) for that duty. The representation is made on filing, so it speaks to the document that reached the court. What the lawyer meant to file does not change it.

That holding matters most to anyone whose job is to check. By the lawyer’s account, the process had a verification step in it, and the step never touched the document the court received. The same logic runs through competence. ABA Formal Opinion 512 puts the national standard this way: relying on an AI tool’s output without an appropriate degree of independent verification could violate the duty of competence. The Eleventh Circuit, hearing an appeal from the Southern District of Florida, was blunter. In Akerlund v. Atlas Air, Inc., No. 24-11033 (11th Cir. July 10, 2026) (opens in a new tab), it said that completely outsourcing legal work to AI software is not competent.

What the corrected draft left out

The court could have stopped there. Instead it read the corrected petition, the one the lawyer said should have been filed, and found a second problem. Whatever else that version fixed, it never disclosed the law against its own argument. Florida decisions going back to at least 1979 hold that certiorari is not available to review an order setting aside a default when no judgment has been entered. “Any competent research (using AI or otherwise)” should have found them, the court wrote.

Two duties meet in that omission. Candor to the tribunal, under Rule 4-3.3(a)(3), forbids a lawyer to knowingly withhold directly adverse authority from the controlling jurisdiction that opposing counsel has not disclosed. In JMOR Properties no one appeared for the other side, so no one else was going to tell the court. Competence reaches the lawyer who never finds the adverse authority at all. The court said that even if the lawyer had not meant to mislead it, the failure to discover the controlling law showed a violation of the duty of competence under Rule 4-1.1.

In other words, checking that every case exists is only the floor. A petition built entirely from real cases can still misstate the law by leaving out the case that decides the question. ABA Formal Opinion 512 (opens in a new tab) lists that failure among the errors a lawyer must catch in AI output before filing, next to misstatements of law and misleading arguments.

The desk before the signature

JMOR Properties involved one lawyer and one machine. Most filings pass through more hands. A paralegal may pull the cases and prepare the motion for filing, and the rules say who answers for each part of that work.

Supervision starts with the lawyer. Rule 4-5.3 requires a supervising lawyer to make reasonable efforts to keep a paralegal’s conduct in line with the lawyer’s own obligations, and it makes the lawyer answer for a violation the lawyer orders. Florida Bar Ethics Opinion 24-1 (opens in a new tab) carries the same standards over to AI: the lawyer reviews a generative AI’s work as the lawyer would review a paralegal’s, and remains responsible for it either way. Blame does not travel down the chain. In Eclectic Synergy, LLC v. Seredin, No. 4D2026-0781 (Fla. 4th DCA May 27, 2026) (opens in a new tab), a lawyer answered a show-cause order by saying a paralegal had done the research. The Fourth District replied that counsel is responsible for the accuracy of the filings and “cannot cast the blame on a paralegal.”

The duty also runs the other way. For a Florida Registered Paralegal, the code in Rule 20-7.1(c) makes it the paralegal’s obligation to avoid conduct that would cause the lawyer to be unethical. The same sentence says loyalty to the lawyer is incumbent on the paralegal. The code binds only paralegals registered with the Bar, but it names a tension any paralegal can meet. It pulls hardest when a lawyer you respect tells you to put the lawyer’s signature on unchecked work.

Two more duties travel with every AI draft. The first is confidentiality. Pasting a client’s records into a public chatbot puts them in the hands of the company that runs it and, if the tool learns from what users type, possibly in front of other users. Rule 4-1.6(e) requires reasonable efforts to prevent that kind of disclosure. ABA Formal Opinion 512 concludes that a client’s informed consent is needed before a lawyer puts such information into a self-learning tool, and that general boilerplate in an engagement letter does not supply it.

The second is the fee. Rule 4-1.5 measures a reasonable fee first by the time, labor, and skill a task requires. ABA Formal Opinion 512 works through the arithmetic. A lawyer who bills by the hour and spends fifteen minutes getting a draft from an AI tool may bill those fifteen minutes and the time spent reviewing the draft for accuracy. The hours the task used to take are not on the bill.

Put together, this is what human in the loop means when someone takes it seriously: a person with the authority and the time to check, placed where the check can still change what gets filed. At 7:10 p.m. on a filing deadline, both are scarce.

Into the partner’s office

The activity seats you in that loop. Dana Whitfield, a partner with twenty-two years of practice, hands you a motion that a free chatbot drafted from the client’s confidential records and tells you to file it tonight. You are not the signer. The signature is hers, and so is the promise that nine cases exist and are accurately cited, but you are the last person between the draft and the court.

Start with Part 1, the Set Up, because the simulation will not teach you the rules; it tests whether you know them. Then copy the Simulator into a fresh chat and play the paralegal honestly. When the scene ends, you build the kind of record the JMOR Properties court demanded after the fact. For each authority you cited, it shows where you confirmed it and whether it says what you said it says.