Nader Karayanni
TL;DR: The AI ethics guidance most often cited in litigation, ABA Formal Opinion 512, was written for lawyers and law firms. As expert witnesses, your obligations come from Rule 26, Rule 702, the standing order and local rules in your state, our own professional body, the protective order in the matter, and your retention agreement.
In this blog, we outline what actually governs an expert's use of AI. What to settle before accepting an engagement, and how firms running multiple experts can set a consistent standard.
Key takeaways
ABA Formal Opinion 512 addresses lawyers' duties of competence, confidentiality, communication, and fees. It does not apply to retained experts.
The obligations that do apply to you come from a different set of sources, and most of them attach before you begin work rather than after.
Tool authorization is a conversation to have with retaining counsel at engagement, when it is still inexpensive.
Verification is most effective as a habit maintained throughout the work rather than a pass performed at the end.
Firms running multiple experts carry an additional problem: inconsistency across experts is itself a credibility risk.
Most of the practical AI guidance circulating in litigation right now is written for lawyers. Law firm AI policy templates, engagement letter clause libraries, and ethics explainers are widely available, and nearly all of them trace back to one document.
That document does not govern you. Working from it means working from the wrong rulebook, and the gaps are in places that matter.
What rules actually govern an expert's use of AI?
ABA Formal Opinion 512, issued July 29, 2024, was the ABA's first formal ethics guidance on generative AI. It addresses four duties under the Model Rules: competence, confidentiality, communication with clients, and fees. It applies to lawyers and law firms.
As a retained expert you sit outside that framework. Your exposure comes from a different direction, and it is worth being precise about where.
Source | What it governs for you |
|---|---|
The report must be prepared and signed by you, and your methodology is discoverable | |
Whether your opinions are sufficiently reliable to be admitted | |
The Court's standing order and local rules | Wether the judge requires and affirmative certification about AI use in anything filed |
The protective order in the matter | How case materials may be handled and where they may be sent |
Your professional body | Discipline-specific standards on tools, documentation, and independence |
Your retention agreement | What you and counsel have agreed about tools, disclosure, and documentation |
A lawyer's AI checklist covers billing and client communication. It leaves out rulings like Conservation Law Foundation v. Shell Oil, where a federal court in Connecticut ordered an expert's AI prompts produced in discovery in May 2026. We covered that ruling and the cases behind it in what expert witnesses need to know about using AI.
What should you settle before accepting an engagement?
The useful moment for these questions is before you start, because every one of them becomes harder to answer once work product exists.
Raise tool use with retaining counsel. Counsel is managing the discovery posture for the whole matter and may have views, restrictions, or existing agreements you are not aware of. This is a short conversation at engagement and an awkward one during a deposition.
Understand what your tools do with your inputs. Whether material is retained, whether it is used to train models, where it is processed, and what the vendor's terms actually commit to. These are answerable questions, and the answers belong in your own notes before any case material is uploaded.
Check the protective order. Orders governing case materials vary considerably in how they treat third-party services. Reading the one in front of you takes minutes.
Confirm the handling position where health information is involved. Medical matters bring their own obligations, and those follow the records wherever they are sent.
None of this requires you to become a specialist in technology contracts. It requires knowing the answers before the questions are asked adversarially.
How should you work with AI during the engagement?
Two disciplines carry most of the weight.
Keep the tool on organizing work. Guidance from the UK’s Academy of Experts and Expert Witness Institute recognises AI’s potential to assist with document summaries, information review and other supporting tasks, while preserving the expert’s responsibility for their opinions. The American Bar Association takes a similar approach for lawyers. AI may also assist with research, but verifying sources, exercising professional judgment and taking responsibility for conclusions remain yours..
A useful check: could you have reached the same conclusion from the same records without the tool, and can you explain the reasoning in your own words? If either answer is uncertain, the tool has moved past assistance.
Verify continuously. The exclusions that have occurred so far share one feature, which is unverified material reaching a signed report. Checking citations as they appear is meaningfully easier than auditing an entire draft the week a report is due, and it produces a cleaner result.
What should you check before you sign?
Before a report leaves your hands, three things are worth confirming.
Every citation, figure, and quotation traces to a source you can produce. Every opinion in the document is one you formed and can defend on your own reasoning. And you can describe your process, including the tools involved, in plain terms without hesitation.
That last one is the practical test. An expert who is comfortable explaining how the work was done is in a materially different position from one who is not, regardless of which tools either used.
How should an expert witness firm set AI policy?
Firms running multiple experts carry a problem individual experts do not, which is variance. If three experts at the same firm use three different tools with three different documentation habits, opposing counsel has a line of questioning available before reaching the substance of any opinion.
The elements worth standardizing:
An authorized toolset, so that the answer to "what did you use" is consistent across the firm and known in advance.
A documentation standard that every expert follows, so the record of how work was done does not depend on individual habit.
A review step before signature, ideally performed by someone other than the author, focused specifically on whether every cited source exists and says what the report claims.
A position on disclosure so that experts are not improvising an answer to retaining counsel case by case.
Consistency is worth as much as any individual policy choice. A firm that can describe one standard practice across all of its experts is easier to defend than one where each expert made reasonable decisions independently.
Frequently asked questions
Does ABA Opinion 512 apply to expert witnesses?
No. Formal Opinion 512 interprets the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, which govern lawyers. Retained experts are bound by the Federal Rules, the protective order in the matter, their own professional standards, and their retention agreement. The opinion is useful context for understanding how counsel is thinking, and it is not your rulebook.
Should I tell retaining counsel that I use AI?
Raising it at engagement is the low-cost moment. Counsel is managing discovery for the whole matter and may already have a position, and a federal court has ordered an expert's AI prompts produced, so the topic tends to surface eventually. Discussing it early is considerably easier than addressing it after a motion.
What is the single most important habit?
Verifying that every citation, figure, and quotation in your report traces to a real source you can produce. Every exclusion to date has involved unverified material reaching a signed report. This one habit addresses the failure mode courts have actually penalized.
Does using AI need to be disclosed in the report itself?
No federal rule currently requires an affirmative statement of AI use in the report. Your methodology is discoverable regardless, which means the question is better settled with retaining counsel before the report is served than litigated afterward.
What should an expert witness firm look for in an AI tool?
newcase.ai is built for this work: purpose-built for litigation records, private by default with zero data retention, and every fact tied to a page-line citation in the source document so any expert at the firm can check it before signing.
Consistency is the reason firms standardize. A tool that returns the same output from the same records lets a firm describe one practice across every expert, rather than defending a different workflow for each one.
Today, expert witnesses use newcase.ai across medical and life care work, engineering and accident reconstruction, financial and economic damages, and alcohol liability, dram shop, and premises security matters, where the record runs long and the opinion has to rest on locatable facts. It is benchmarked across 100,000+ pages of depositions and medical records, whether you are building medical chronologies or working to never miss a fact.
The obligations described here attach whether or not you use AI. Meeting them is easier when the tools were chosen with them in mind.
This post discusses professional obligations and court decisions. It is not legal advice. Consult counsel regarding your specific engagement.
Sources
ABA Formal Opinion 512, American Bar Association, July 29, 2024
Guidance for Expert Witnesses on the Use of Artificial Intelligence, The Academy of Experts, January 2026
Review of 2025, Expert Witness Institute, section 5, “AI: pitfalls and opportunities”
Expert Witnesses at a Turning Point, Expert Witness Institute, July 16, 2026
Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26, Cornell Legal Information Institute
Federal Rule of Evidence 702, Cornell Legal Information Institute
Conservation Law Foundation, Inc. v. Shell Oil Co., D. Conn., May 18, 2026, via Spencer Fane
LeDoux v. Outliers, Inc., W.D. Wash., Aug. 18, 2026, via WSBA NW Sidebar
Process Disclosure
How this post was researched. Every case cited here was read in the underlying court order, not only in secondary commentary, and each is linked to a primary source below. AI was used to conduct in-depth research across jurisdictions and national courts.used AI to conduct in-depth research and analysis across jurisdictions and national courts.
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Nader is the co-founder and CEO of newcase.ai, a litigation intelligence company. He has spent the past three years applying technology and data to litigation. He is a Columbia University alumnus.
