“This Is About Giving Every Defender the Tools to Do Right by Their Clients,” Says Lead Author
Washington, DC (July 30, 2026) – The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) has released a new white paper, Parity in Practice: The Defender’s Duty to Ethically Use AI, offering criminal defense lawyers a roadmap for putting generative artificial intelligence to work: thoughtfully, ethically, and to the benefit of their clients.
“AI is already inside the courtroom,” said NACDL President Andrew S. Birrell. “The defenders who learn to use AI well are the ones who are going to out-lawyer the other side: catching the contradiction buried in ten hours of bodycam footage, or the sentencing disparity nobody had time to find by hand. That’s not something to fear. That’s a real opportunity to do right by our clients, and defenders have an ethical duty to rise to it.”
As NACDL’s white paper notes, generative AI has moved into legal practice at extraordinary speed. ChatGPT alone reached roughly 100 million users within two months of its 2022 launch, and prosecutors’ offices around the country are already using AI to manage evidence, streamline discovery, and even automate review of old convictions for possible resentencing.
These tools are becoming embedded in legal research, document review, investigation, and trial preparation, often faster than the ethical rules governing their use can be clarified. NACDL's white paper is designed to help defense lawyers adopt them responsibly, addressing core professional responsibility obligations including competence, client confidentiality, and candor to the court.
“Every day, our members stand between individual clients and a government with vastly superior resources regarding investigators, data, and time,” said NACDL Executive Director Lisa M. Wayne. “No single defender can match that. Used carefully and ethically, AI is one of the few tools that can help level that field, and we have a duty to understand it well enough to use it for our clients without ever compromising their rights.”
NACDL's guidance frames responsible AI adoption as a means for the defense bar to meet, rather than be outpaced by, that resource disparity, without sacrificing the professional obligations that distinguish zealous, ethical advocacy from prosecutorial overreach.
The report highlights defender offices already putting AI to good use: from the Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy using AI-powered software to sift through a surge of bodycam footage, to the California Innocence Project using AI to help surface inconsistencies in witness statements and testimony in wrongful-conviction cases, to a Los Angeles County Public Defender initiative designed to cut manual data entry from case documents by up to 85%.
The white paper walks through how generative AI works and where it’s already showing up in defense practice, then maps the specific duties it implicates under the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct, before turning to concrete guidance on vetting AI vendors, weighing risk task by task, training staff, and building an office-wide AI use policy. A full model policy, ready for any office or firm to adapt, is included as an appendix.
“With the right guidance and the right guardrails, generative AI can genuinely improve how defenders practice: sharpening legal research, lightening workloads, and freeing lawyers to spend more of their time on the judgment calls that only a human advocate can make,” said Mason R. Clark, the report’s lead author and an Assistant Professor of Law at St. Mary’s University School of Law. “That’s the opportunity here, and this white paper is meant to help defenders seize it effectively.”
The white paper doesn’t shy away from the technology’s growing pains. It notes that generative AI still “hallucinates,” inventing case citations, quotations, and legal propositions that sound authoritative but aren’t real, and that even legal-specific research tools marketed as more reliable are not immune. “That’s exactly why we can’t just tell defenders to go use AI,” Clark said. “We must tell them how: How to verify what it gives them, how to protect client confidentiality, and how to keep their own judgment squarely in the driver’s seat.”
“Defenders can set the ethical bar for how this profession uses AI, and that’s exactly what we intend to do,” said Birrell. “We’re going to lead on using this technology responsibly and hold everyone else in the system to that same standard.”
NACDL’s Task Force on Artificial Intelligence will build on the white paper’s release with ongoing training, shared model policies, and resources for defenders navigating AI adoption at every budget level, from solo practitioners to statewide public defender systems.
“This isn’t a one-and-done report; it’s the start of a dialogue we intend to keep having with our members,” said Wayne. “Technology isn’t going to slow down, and neither will we. I want every defender in this country walking into a courtroom with the sharpest tools available and the know-how to use them well, and that’s exactly what we intend to deliver.”
Parity in Practice: The Defender’s Duty to Ethically Use AI is available at https://www.nacdl.org/ParityInPractice. A version of the white paper is forthcoming in the inaugural edition of The Journal of Advocacy and Litigation (https://www.tjal.org/about) (Vol. 1, 2026), a peer-reviewed journal supported by Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, Syracuse University College of Law, Texas Southern University’s Thurgood Marshall School of Law, the University of Illinois College of Law, and the University of San Francisco School of Law.
Contacts
Jonathan Hutson, NACDL Senior Director of Public Affairs and Communications, 202-480-5343 or jhutson@nacdl.org
The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers is the preeminent organization advancing the mission of the criminal defense bar to ensure justice and due process for persons accused of crime or wrongdoing. A professional bar association founded in 1958, NACDL's many thousands of direct members in 28 countries – and 90 state, provincial and local affiliate organizations totaling up to 40,000 attorneys – include private criminal defense lawyers, public defenders, military defense counsel, law professors and judges committed to preserving fairness and promoting a rational and humane criminal legal system.
