SB 574 Is Here.
October 2026 · VdVLaw
It Is a Bigger Deal Than You Think
Somewhere in California right now, an attorney is leaning back in an ergonomic chair, sipping black coffee, and saying the most comforting sentence in modern legal practice: “We don’t use AI here.”
It sounds discerning. It is also wrong. AI is already in the building. Nobody installed it. It arrived in an update, like a houseguest who moved in while you were at a hearing and has been eating out of your refrigerator for a year. It is in Gmail, in Word, in the meeting summary, and in the phone keyboard that just finished your associate’s sentence without being asked and got it wrong.
On January 1, 2027, SB 574 walks in behind it, points at the houseguest, and asks what your plan is.
The Legislature passed it unanimously, which in Sacramento is roughly a unicorn sighting. Most attorneys I talk to have it filed under “AI thing, deal with later,” somewhere between the new jury instructions and the gym membership. Two problems with that. The law is not just about AI. And “we don’t use AI here” is not a policy. It is a hope with a filing deadline.
What SB 574 Actually Does
Two things. The second one is the sleeper.
First, it adds section 6068.1 to the State Bar Act, the part of the law that decides whether you keep your Bar card. If you use generative AI in your practice, four duties follow you around:
1. No delegating the practice of law to AI. The robot does not get a Bar card and will not sit at counsel table in a tiny polyester necktie. The machine drafts. You decide.
2. No confidential or personally identifying information goes into an AI system unless access is restricted to you and to people you have authorized who are bound to keep it confidential. The free chat box on a personal account fails that test. It does not know there is a test. It thinks you are friends.
3. You verify the output and fix the errors, including case and statute citations. The industry calls the errors hallucinations, which makes it sound like the software went camping without a tent. The court will call them something else.
4. You disclose AI use to the court as the statute requires. How far that reaches is one place the statute goes vague, so your policy should say how you handle it.
Second, the sleeper. It amends Code of Civil Procedure section 128.7, the sanctions statute. Every citation in a paper filed with the court must be personally verified by the attorney responsible for it. Not the firm. Not the paralegal. Not the vendor whose brochure says it is trusted by 10,000 firms. You, the person whose name is on the caption. The 21-day safe harbor stays, the firm is jointly responsible absent exceptional circumstances, and discovery papers are excluded under subdivision (g). Your briefs are not.
“Trust, but verify.”
President Ronald Reagan to General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, INF Treaty signing, December 8, 1987
Gorbachev’s reply: “You repeat that at every meeting.” Reagan: “I like it.” Starting January 1, the Legislature likes it too.
A section 6068.1 violation can mean State Bar discipline. A bad cite under section 128.7 can cost money and earn you a paragraph in a published order that your colleagues will read aloud at lunch.
Not by the firm. Not by the paralegal. By you, the person whose name is on the caption.
It Is Not Just About AI
Read the citation rule again. It does not say every citation generated by AI. It says every citation. The statute does not ask where the cite came from. It asks whether you, personally, checked it. That covers:
• The brief template you have reused since 2014, including the case in paragraph four that was reversed in 2019 and has been quietly lying to judges ever since.
• The memo your associate wrote from memory at midnight.
• The cite your research platform’s AI summary handed you with a little sparkle icon next to it, which is the digital equivalent of a wink.
• The case you argued in 2018 and remember perfectly, in the way everyone remembers 2018 perfectly.
Even the most famous line about false certainty has a citation problem:
“It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Attributed to Mark Twain on the opening screen of The Big Short (2015). Twain never wrote it.
A major motion picture put the wrong author in front of millions of people, which is roughly what happens to a bad case cite once it moves into a template.
So the attorney who never touches a chatbot still gets a new, personal, non-delegable duty on January 1. A staff cite-check is a fine routine. It is not your personal verification. The statute says personally, and legislatures do not reach for adverbs by accident.
One caveat for my criminal defense readers: section 128.7 lives in the Code of Civil Procedure, and whether it reaches criminal filings is a question nobody I have read has answered yet. Ask your own counsel. Section 6068.1 applies whenever AI touched the work, in any court.
“We Don’t Use AI Here”
I hear this weekly, usually from someone whose email program just suggested the rest of their sentence.
Unless your practice runs on a 1982 typewriter powered by a stationary bicycle, the houseguest is in every room. Gmail drafts replies. Gemini sits in Docs and Drive like a cat on a warm laptop. Word and Outlook carry Copilot. Your meeting software summarizes the client call onto a server you have never thought about. Then there is the human layer: the paralegal with a personal ChatGPT account and a deadline at 4:45, and the secretary fixing margins on an unredacted police report in the browser tab that gets minimized when you walk down the hall.
Douglas Adams saw this coming a quarter century ago:
“Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary. ... Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt (2002). In the 1999 Sunday Times original, the cutoff was thirty. The rule got older, like everyone who quotes it.
The houseguest does not care how old you are. And a blanket ban does not stop any of this. It drives it underground. Prohibition does not end the conduct; it ends the conversation about the conduct. Ask anyone who has ever taped a laminated sign above an office microwave.
The statute does not ask whether you meant to use AI. It asks whether confidential information went into a generative AI system and who could get at it afterward. When a police report with dates of birth and a psychiatric evaluation goes into a free chatbot to fix the formatting, that data has left your office, and telling the State Bar that you personally prefer fountain pens does not bring it back.
And “we don’t” is not a policy. A policy is a document. It has a date, decisions, and a signature. When a judge, a carrier, a client, or the State Bar asks what your firm’s practice is, “we don’t” is a conversation. A policy is an answer. The State Bar does not accept hopeful vibes as an operational protocol. It wants paper.
Why You Need a Policy You Can Point To
A policy is not a 40-page manifesto. Nobody reads one, including the person who wrote it, who stopped at page 12 and started adjusting the margins. One clear page gets read, and a policy that gets read is the only kind that works. The page says six things:
1. Approved tools and accounts, with the retention, sharing and training switches locked down and written down. Not whatever was free last Tuesday.
2. What never goes in. “Use common sense” is not a boundary. It is a wish.
3. Who verifies what, and how it is recorded. The signing attorney opened the source, checked the pinpoint, and wrote that down before filing.
4. How the office tracks whether AI touched a draft, so the court-disclosure call is made consistently instead of in the hallway.
5. What happens on a mistake. Someone will paste the police report into the wrong thing. Who do they call, what gets documented, what gets deleted.
6. When the page gets reviewed. The tools change their settings more often than the weather, and the settings do not send a card.
With a dated page, the answer to “how was this brief prepared” is: here is our rule, here is the record, here is what we did about the exception. Without one, the answer is a facial expression.
Train Your Staff, Not Just Your Attorneys
Most firms treat SB 574 as an attorney problem. The attorney reads the statute, nods gravely, and goes back to work. Meanwhile the person most likely to paste a police report into a free chatbot is whoever has the most work and the least time, which in most offices is everyone who is not the attorney. None of them signed the brief. Any of them can sink it. Rules 5.1 and 5.3 make you responsible for the people you supervise, and “I never told them” is not a defense you want to hear yourself reading aloud.
Training is not a seminar. It is 30 minutes: here are the tools, here are the accounts, here is what never goes in, here is who checks cites, here is who you call when you pasted the wrong thing. Everyone signs. When something goes sideways, there is a world of difference between “we had a rule, we trained on it, and someone broke it” and “we had a vibe.”
If You Are a Sole Practitioner, the Staff Is You
Solo attorneys get to skip the staff meeting and keep every other obligation. You are the managing partner, the compliance officer and the IT department, and the IT department has been switching on AI features in your software for two years without telling the managing partner. There is nobody down the hall to blame, which is the worst feature of solo practice after the printer.
Know what is switched on. Decide in writing what you use for what. Build a citation routine with a dated note, because on January 1 the only witness is going to be that note. The solo who swears off AI and then lets Gmail draft the reply to the district attorney is not avoiding the statute. They are just meeting it unprepared.
What to Do First
1. Find out what is already switched on. Every account, every program, every phone. You have more of them than you think.
2. Write the one page. Date it. Print it. Put it where the microwave sign used to be.
3. Spend 30 minutes with everyone who touches a file, and get a signature. If that is only you, sign it anyway. Future you will want the date.
4. Build the citation routine: every cite, checked at the source by the responsible attorney, with a record. This one does not care whether AI was in the room.
If a one-page plan sounds too small for a statute, take it up with the general who planned D-Day:
“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower, remarks to the National Defense Executive Reserve Conference, November 14, 1957
Eisenhower planned D-Day. You are planning one page. The value is in the deciding, and the page is the proof that you decided.
None of this guarantees compliance, and anyone who promises that is selling something that cannot be delivered. It gives you reasonable steps, a record, and a straight answer when someone asks, which is what the statute is actually asking for.
This Is the Work I Do
My day job is case cartography: attorney-directed discovery review, cross-referencing messy police reports against the source video and audio, and spotting where a machine summary drifted away from the record. SB 574 is that same discipline turned on your own office.
So I set it up for California firms and solo practices: the configured commercial workspace with the privacy controls verified, the written AI Use and SB 574 policy covering attorneys and staff, citation-verification checklists and court-disclosure tracking, a client intake package for the client who already put the case into a chat box, staff training with signed acknowledgments, and dated records of what was done. Many firms start with a $350 SB 574 & AI Readiness Review, credited in full if setup starts within 14 days. The details are on the AI Setup for Law Firms page.
I’m one person and January 1 isn’t moving, so setups go on the calendar in the order people reach out.
The Chatbot Will Not Be at the Hearing
The technology is not going anywhere. The days of treating it like a casual browser experiment with no paper trail are over. The statute is here. The standard is written down. And the principle is older than any chatbot:
Trust, but verify.
Yes, I repeat that at every meeting. I like it.
The chatbot will not be at the hearing. It never is. You will be, and so will the record of what you checked.
More in This Series
SB 574 is the compliance end of a longer conversation about AI and the record. If you want the rest of it:
The Chat Box Is Not a Vault: clients and staff using AI on their own.
The Police Report Wrote Itself: AI-assisted police reports and the body camera footage behind them.
Banning AI Will Not Teach Legal Judgment: law schools and the next generation of attorneys.
This File Needs a Case Cartographer: what source-grounded case mapping is, and why it matters.
The thread through all of them is the same as this one. AI is not the story by itself. The story is judgment, and whether anyone checked.
VdVLaw provides attorney-directed legal support and consulting services. VdVLaw is not a law firm, I am not an attorney, and nothing in this article is legal advice. SB 574 is new, parts of it are unsettled, and the attorney responsible for a filing decides how it applies. Statutory statements were checked against the chaptered text as of October 9, 2026. I use AI tools in research and drafting; every source cited here was read and verified by me before publication.
Sources and Further Reading
SB 574 (Stats. 2026, ch. 858), chaptered text adding Business and Professions Code section 6068.1 and amending Code of Civil Procedure section 128.7: https://legiscan.com/CA/text/SB574/id/3461240; bill history and votes: https://legiscan.com/CA/bill/SB574/2025; official bill page, California Legislative Information: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260SB574
Holland & Knight, California Enacts Rules Governing Lawyers’ Use of Generative AI (October 2026): https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2026/10/california-enacts-rules-governing-lawyers-use-of-generative-ai
California Rules of Professional Conduct, rules 5.1 and 5.3 (supervision of lawyers and nonlawyer assistants): https://www.calbar.ca.gov/sites/default/files/portals/0/documents/rules/Rules-of-Professional-Conduct-0.pdf
State Bar of California, Practical Guidance for the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence in the Practice of Law (updated May 2026), Ethics and Technology Resources: https://www.calbar.ca.gov/legal-professionals/ethics-compliance-practice-resources/ethics/ethics-technology-resources
Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Remarks on Signing the INF Treaty (December 8, 1987): https://reaganlibrary.gov/public/2020-06/1-remarks-on-inf.pdf; The American Presidency Project, Eisenhower, Remarks at the National Defense Executive Reserve Conference (November 14, 1957): https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-national-defense-executive-reserve-conference
Epigraph sources. The Big Short’s fake Mark Twain quote, The New Republic (December 29, 2015): https://newrepublic.com/minutes/126677/it-aint-dont-know-gets-trouble-must-big-short-opens-fake-mark-twain-quote; Quote Investigator (November 18, 2018): https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/11/18/know-trouble/; Douglas Adams, How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet, The Sunday Times (August 29, 1999), reprinted in The Salmon of Doubt (2002): https://wwwtest.internet.psych.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/532-Master/532-UnitPages/Unit-14/DouglasAdams_1999_Edited.pdf
INDEPENDENT PARTNER • AI MOTION DRAFTING FOR CALIFORNIA CRIMINAL DEFENSE
SO ORDERED finds the motion you already wrote. If you wish to use AI to help write the next one, use it responsibly: put a firm AI policy in place first, then use the right tool.
Draft Master is an independent company whose drafting and redaction tool is built around SB 574. VdVLaw does not own or sell Draft Master. As an independent consultant, VdVLaw reviews the tool and reports the gaps it finds to the builder. Neither company certifies the other's compliance. Attorneys remain responsible for reviewing, verifying, and signing everything they file.