On September 30, Governor Newsom signed SB 574. It passed the Assembly 75 to 0 and the Senate 40 to 0. On January 1, 2027, California becomes, in the words of one law firm's alert, "the first state to specifically regulate attorneys' use of generative AI by statute."

Most of what has been written about SB 574 so far comes from large firms writing for corporate clients. This is for the family law firm with about six weeks to get ready, and for firms in other states watching to see what AI for law firms will look like once it is written into statute.

What does SB 574 require of attorneys?

The new section 6068.1 sets four duties.

No delegation. The text is one sentence: "An attorney shall not delegate the practice of law to generative artificial intelligence." The statute does not define delegation.

Confidentiality. An attorney may not enter confidential, personal identifying or other nonpublic information into a generative AI system unless access to it is restricted to the attorney and persons the attorney authorizes. As Wood Smith Henning & Berman put it, the restriction "turns on whether access to the information is limited to the attorney and authorized persons." The rule is about who can see what you typed.

Verification. An attorney who uses generative AI must take reasonable steps to verify its output, including every case and statutory citation, and to correct anything erroneous or hallucinated.

Disclosure. The attorney must "disclose the use of generative artificial intelligence to the court for all documents submitted to the court."

Separately, section 128.7 now says a filed paper "shall not contain any citations that an attorney responsible for submitting the pleading has not personally verified." That applies to every citation, including the ones a person typed.

The law defines generative AI as a system "that can generate derived synthetic content." King & Spalding reads that to cover legal AI products and tools like Copilot, and to leave out search engines and predictive analytics.

What does the AI disclosure rule mean for court filings?

Nobody knows yet, and the firms that have studied it say so.

Read literally, the clause could require a disclosure in every document a firm files. King & Spalding's lawyers write that this is "likely not what the legislature meant," and suggest it applies when AI contributed to a document's content, research or analysis. They add: "Until courts or the State Bar weigh in, there is an unfortunate ambiguity." Wood Smith notes the statute "does not prescribe a particular disclosure form."

Think about what a family law firm files in a week. A declaration a paralegal shaped from the client's notes with an AI drafting tool. An Income and Expense Declaration completed from the client's records by an AI system. A brief whose first outline came from a research product. Each one is a document submitted to the court, and under the literal text each one may need a disclosure. That includes work done with products like ours.

The practical answer is to know, for every filing, whether AI touched it and how, so that when a court or the State Bar says what disclosure looks like, your firm can comply the same day. A firm that can't answer that question on January 2 has a records problem before it has an ethics problem.

Why does SB 574 hit family law firms hardest?

Three reasons.

The files are the most personal a firm holds. Tax returns, bank statements, medical and school records, Social Security numbers. The confidentiality rule is written for exactly this kind of material. If anyone on your team pastes it into a public chatbot, that becomes a breach of a statute on January 1. I wrote about the client side of this in what to tell a client who asked ChatGPT first.

Family lawyers draft the court's orders. In March, a California Court of Appeal decided a dispute between former domestic partners over who kept the dog. One side's lawyer had cited two cases that do not exist. The other side's counsel was told to prepare the order after hearing, and carried those citations into it. The court signed. On appeal, the justices agreed the trial court erred, then held the challenge forfeited because counsel had drafted "the very order containing these fabricated citations." The lawyer who supplied the cases was sanctioned $5,000 and reported to the State Bar.

The opinion's rule is the one SB 574 now puts in the code: "An attorney submitting any document to a court has an obligation to verify the citations contained in it." A citation that reached your proposed order from the other side's letter is still yours when you submit it.

Some matters leave the courtroom. If any of your cases go to arbitration, section 1282.1 applies to the arbitrator: "An arbitrator shall not delegate any part of their decisionmaking process to any generative artificial intelligence tool." An arbitrator also may not rely on AI-generated information from outside the record without telling the parties first.

What happens if a firm gets it wrong?

The citation rule sits inside section 128.7, so the existing sanctions process applies, including the 21 days to withdraw or correct a challenged paper. A represented party cannot be ordered to pay monetary sanctions for a violation of the new citation paragraph. That leaves the lawyer and the firm.

Judge Mary Ann Murphy, writing in the November issue of Advocate, lists what follows a sanction in California: courts must report nondiscovery sanctions of $1,000 or more to the State Bar, and the attorney must self-report within 30 days. The published AI cases she collects carry sanctions of roughly $1,000 to $10,000. The money is the small part.

WilmerHale's lawyers point out that the statute names no specific penalty for the disclosure and delegation provisions. Section 6068.1 sits among the duties of an attorney, so I would expect the State Bar to have a say. That part is my reading, not settled law.

A checklist for the weeks before January 1

1. List every tool your firm uses that generates text, including the AI features inside research platforms, email and office software.

2. For each one, write down who can access what you enter, whether it is used to train models, and how long it is kept. If you can't get an answer, keep client information out of it.

3. Name the attorney who verifies citations on each filing. Verify against the source: the case exists, the quote is there, the holding is what you say it is. A second AI tool does not count.

4. Put proposed orders, and anything drafted from the other side's papers, through the same check.

5. Record AI use for each document you file, and decide on disclosure filing by filing. Check the judge's standing orders and local rules first.

6. Put all of it on one page, and train the paralegals and legal assistants, not only the attorneys. They do much of the drafting.

7. Tell clients what the firm uses, and what they should keep out of public chatbots.

Is your state next?

California is first, and the votes were unanimous. Legislators elsewhere will notice. The duties themselves are not new: verify what you file, protect what clients give you, stay responsible for the work. Bar guidance in other states already says much the same, as I covered in AI for family law: what works and where to start. What is new is that a legislature wrote them down with a start date. I would run the checklist above in any state.

Where Del fits

We built Del, our AI teammate for law firms, for firms that carry this kind of responsibility. Del answers questions about a matter with the source document attached, so the person checking the work has the page in front of them. Client data is never used to train models. And Del does the first pass while your team reviews it and the attorney stays in charge. You can read more about how we approach AI for law firms and family law practices.

SB 574 does not ask firms to give up AI. It asks them to be able to say who can see the client's information, who checked the citations, and whether AI helped write what the court is reading. Firms that can answer those three questions will barely notice January 1. Firms that can't will find out in front of a judge.

If you want to see how Del works on a real matter file, you can start a free trial.

This is practical commentary, not legal advice. SB 574 is new and parts of it are unsettled, so read the statute and check the rules of your own court and state.

Related reading: Your Client Asked ChatGPT First. That Chat May Be Evidence. · Hidden Text in a Court Filing Told AI to Take a Side