Legal Ethics & Professional Responsibility

The profession that polices itself

Near the end of each month, The Florida Bar posts a news release with a blunt headline: the Florida Supreme Court has disciplined some number of attorneys. One release in 2026 named twelve: three disbarred, seven suspended, and two reprimanded. Each entry gives the lawyer’s name, the discipline, a few sentences on what went wrong, and a case number. Every lawyer on that list broke a duty that comes with legal work, and paralegals carry most of those duties too. This reading covers where the duties come from, what they ask of you, and how AI has changed one of them. The activity then sends you to the same list to pick a case of your own.

All that enforcement protects a standard. Legal professionalism is a commitment to act ethically, work competently, and answer to clients, the courts, and the public. The written rules set a floor under it, and professionalism is the reason to stand well above the floor. It shows in things no rule spells out, like returning an anxious client’s call today instead of Friday, or catching the typo that no one else would have noticed.

The written rules start with the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct. One point trips up new students: the Model Rules are not law. The American Bar Association is a private association of lawyers, and it has no power over anyone’s law license. Each state writes its own binding code, and most start from the ABA’s template. You can see the borrowing in the numbers. The Model Rules (opens in a new tab) put competence at Rule 1.1. The Rules Regulating The Florida Bar (opens in a new tab) put it at Rule 4-1.1, Chapter 4 plus the ABA’s number, in nearly the same words. A Florida lawyer answers to Rule 4-1.1. The ABA’s version is where it came from.

In Florida, the Bar investigates complaints against lawyers and prosecutes the cases, and the Florida Supreme Court decides them. That is why the monthly headline names the court. A profession that asks strangers to hand over their secrets and their money has to show them that its rules are enforced. So the results are public.

The duties you owe

Suppose you are working on a client’s case and find, in a public court database, that she filed for bankruptcy years ago. Can you mention it to a friend? Anyone could look it up, after all. Under the Model Rules, the answer is still no, and the reason is the duty of confidentiality. It covers information relating to the representation “whatever its source,” in the words of the ABA’s comment to Model Rule 1.6. The duty binds the whole legal team, paralegals and staff included, and the lawyers who supervise them must see that they keep it.

Confidentiality is broader than the attorney-client privilege, and students often blur the two. The privilege is a rule of evidence. It protects confidential communications between a lawyer and client made for legal advice, and it matters when someone tries to force a lawyer to testify or hand over evidence. Confidentiality applies everywhere else: at a dinner party, in a group chat, on a crowded elevator. Its purpose is candor. A client who fears the story will leak starts leaving parts out, and advice built on half the facts can be wrong.

The duty of competence asks for the legal knowledge, skill, thoroughness, and preparation a matter reasonably requires. What it looks like depends on the job. For an attorney it can mean arriving at a hearing having read the whole file and the law behind it. For a paralegal it means documents free of errors and a check that every cited case is still good law. That check matters because courts overrule and reverse decisions, and a brief that leans on an overruled case loses the court’s trust the moment the other side points it out.

One more duty draws a hard line for anyone without a law license. The unauthorized practice of law is a non-lawyer giving legal advice, drafting legal documents for others, or representing someone in court. Picture a paralegal whose cousin, facing eviction, asks whether to sign the landlord’s settlement offer. General information about how evictions work is not the problem. Telling the cousin to sign is legal advice, and the paralegal has no license to give it. The ban protects the public from advice given by people who are not licensed, regulated, or insured to give it. Paralegals do a great deal of legal work, but they do it under a lawyer’s supervision, and the NALA Code of Ethics (opens in a new tab) written for paralegals puts the prohibition in its first canon.

Competence now includes the machine

In 2023, Roberto Mata was suing the airline Avianca over a knee injury from a metal serving cart. Avianca asked a federal court in New York to dismiss the case as filed too late. One of Mata’s lawyers researched the response with ChatGPT. The filing cited cases that did not exist, among them Varghese v. China Southern Airlines. The lawyer later testified that he had tried to look that case up, could not find it, and cited it anyway. When the court questioned the cases, he asked ChatGPT whether one was real, and the chatbot assured him it was. The lawyer who signed the filing had not written it. By his own account, he read it for flow and grammar.

In Mata v. Avianca, Inc. (opens in a new tab), Judge P. Kevin Castel imposed a $5,000 penalty on the two lawyers and their firm. He also ordered them to write to every judge falsely named as the author of a fake opinion. Using a reliable AI tool, he wrote, is not improper in itself. But the rules give lawyers “a gatekeeping role” over the accuracy of their filings. These lawyers abandoned that role, then kept defending the fake opinions after the court questioned them.

The duty that failed in Mata was competence. The official comment to Model Rule 1.1 says a lawyer should keep up with the benefits and risks of relevant technology, and a chatbot that invents cases is a risk worth knowing about. ABA Formal Opinion 512, issued in 2024, applies that duty to generative AI, along with confidentiality, communication with clients, candor to the court, supervision, and reasonable fees. It warns that relying on AI output without checking it can put false statements in front of a court. So the lawyer stays responsible for verifying whatever the tool produces, and a confident answer from the tool excuses nothing. The full opinion (opens in a new tab) is on the ABA’s site.

Florida wrote the lesson into its signature rule. Under Florida Rule 2.515(d)(2), effective June 15, 2026, anyone who signs a court filing represents that the legal authorities it cites exist and are accurately cited. A court may impose sanctions for a filing inconsistent with that representation, whether the signer is an attorney or a person representing themselves. The rule’s text never mentions AI, and it does not need to. A signature now vouches for every citation above it, whoever or whatever found them. Had the Mata filing come before a Florida court under this rule, the signature alone would have promised that Varghese was real.

From rule to enforcement

The activity brings these duties back to the list this reading opened with. After an overview, you turn them on yourself: the Skills Self-Assessment Coach asks about your own work habits and holds them up against the duty of competence. Then you pick a case from the Florida Bar Disciplinary Actions (opens in a new tab) page and follow its case number to the attorney’s Bar profile. There the Complaint or the Report of Referee tells you what the lawyer actually did. You rewrite those facts as fiction, ask an AI to predict the sanction, and check its prediction against the real outcome. That check is the habit Opinion 512 and Florida’s signature rule ask of every lawyer. The AI sees only the fiction. You know how the real case ended.