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Regulation

ABA Formal Opinion 512

ABA Formal Opinion 512 is the American Bar Association's 2024 ethical guidance on lawyers' use of generative AI, addressing competence, confidentiality, supervision, fees, and candor.

What is ABA Formal Opinion 512?

Opinion 512 holds that lawyers may use generative AI provided they understand its capabilities and limitations, protect client confidentiality (no input of confidential information into systems that retain or train on it without consent), supervise output quality, communicate AI use where required, and bill reasonably for AI-assisted work. The opinion is influential beyond the US and is increasingly cited by European bar associations developing their own guidance.

How does ABA Formal Opinion 512 apply to enterprise AI?

Legal-tech AI vendors selling to US firms must support confidentiality controls (no training on inputs, EU residency options, audit logs) consistent with Opinion 512 expectations. Internal legal teams adopting AI should map their policies to the opinion's five themes.

Related terms

Governance

Transparency Notice

A transparency notice is a clear disclosure to users that they are interacting with an AI system, what it is doing with their data, and what its limits are.
Governance

AI Risk Management

AI risk management is the discipline of identifying, assessing, mitigating, and monitoring the harms an AI system can cause across its lifecycle.
Methodology

Data Residency

Data residency is the requirement that personal or regulated data stays within a specified geographic region throughout processing, storage, and backup.

External references

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