Can Your Lawyer Use AI on Your Case? California’s SB 574

SB 574 is the first California law to address whether a machine can make those decisions for them.

It passed the Legislature unanimously on August 31, 2026, and is now with the Governor, who has until September 30 to act on it. Under the state constitution, if he does nothing, it becomes law anyway. It would take effect January 1, 2027.

What the bill actually does

SB 574 adds a new section to the Business and Professions Code, § 6068.1, which sits right alongside the section that has listed a California attorney’s basic duties for more than a century. The core sentence is short: an attorney “shall not delegate the practice of law to generative artificial intelligence.”

Around that, the bill requires attorneys to verify AI output, including every citation. It bars them from entering confidential or personally identifying client information into AI systems that aren’t access-restricted. It requires them to correct hallucinated output, meaning material the system invented and presented as real. And it requires them to consider disclosing AI use.

It also amends Code of Civil Procedure § 128.7, the rule governing what lawyers certify when they sign a court filing, to bar filing any paper containing a citation the responsible attorney has not personally verified.

A separate new section, § 1282.1, tells arbitrators they may not delegate any part of their decision-making to generative AI, and may not rely on AI-generated material outside the record without telling the parties first.

All of that is sensible. Most of it describes what a careful lawyer was already doing.

SB 574 regulates your lawyer’s conduct and hands every remedy to the court and the State Bar. The client, whose case is the thing actually at risk, gets no mechanism at all. Whether that gap matters is a separate question from whether the bill is otherwise sound.

Follow the enforcement

The fastest way to understand any statute is to ask who can do something when it is broken.

SB 574 creates no private right of action. It creates no new cause of action and no civil penalty. Only two consequences are available when an attorney violates it.

The first is sanctions from the court under § 128.7. That process has a built-in 21-day safe harbor, meaning a lawyer who gets caught generally has three weeks to withdraw the offending filing and avoid penalty. It exists to protect the integrity of the proceeding.

The second is State Bar discipline, which protects the public in the broad, institutional sense that professional licensing protects the public.

Neither mechanism gives the client anything directly. If your attorney filed a brief built on cases that do not exist, the court can sanction them, and the Bar can discipline them. Your case still lost the motion.

A mechanism partly bridges this, and it is worth knowing about: under existing law, a California attorney already has to self-report certain judicial sanctions to the State Bar. So a sanction over AI misuse can open a disciplinary file without any client ever filing a complaint. But that chain starts with a judge noticing, in a filing, in a case that reached a motion. It does nothing for the client whose lawyer used AI badly somewhere that never reached a courtroom.

The arbitration provision is the one to watch

The part of SB 574 that got the least coverage is the part most likely to matter and least likely to be detected.

Section 1282.1 bars an arbitrator from delegating any part of their decision-making to generative AI. Arbitration is where an enormous volume of consumer and employment disputes actually gets resolved, and it is private by design. There is no public docket. Appellate review of an arbitration award is famously narrow.

If an arbitrator ran your case through an AI system and adopted what it produced, you would probably never find out. The rule is correct. The odds of anyone detecting a violation are low.

The fair objection

There is a real argument against the thing we are pointing at, and it deserves a straight answer.

Adding a private right of action to a rule like this would generate satellite litigation. Every client unhappy with an outcome would have a new theory to plead, courts would spend time on collateral fights about a lawyer’s software rather than the merits of the underlying case, and the cost of that would ultimately land on clients. 

Professional conduct in California has always been policed through the Bar and the courts, not through private suits, and that is a defensible design.

That objection holds. But it answers a question about remedies, not about information. The existing machinery only starts moving when someone notices, and under this bill the person with the most at stake and the strongest motivation to notice has no entitlement to the underlying facts. A disclosure requirement is not a cause of action. The bill requires attorneys to “consider” disclosure. It could have required disclosure.

What to ask your firm directly

Since the bill doesn’t require your firm to volunteer this information, the practical response is to ask directly. Any competent firm will have answers, and how they respond tells you as much as what they say.

Does anyone here use AI tools on case files, and for what? Research, document review, drafting correspondence, and summarizing records are different activities with different risk profiles. A firm that says “never” in 2026 is either unusual or not answering carefully.

Who checks the output, and what is the verification step? Under § 6068.1, the answer must be a person, and that person must be an attorney. Ask who.

Does my file go into any AI system, and is that system access-restricted? This is the confidentiality provision, and it is the question with the clearest right answer.

If this case goes to arbitration, will you ask the arbitrator the same question? In practice, this is a question few clients think to ask. Under § 1282.1, they are now entitled to.

None of that requires a statute. It just requires knowing the rules exist.

The Legislature spent this session deciding what artificial intelligence may and may not do inside a law office. Whether the client sitting across the desk is entitled to know the answer is a question the bill leaves open.