Sedona Conference: Navigating AI in the Judiciary

The Sedona Conference has published “Navigating AI in the Judiciary: New Guidelines for Judges and Their Chambers,” 26 Sedona Conf. J. 1 (Feb. 2025); see also Navigating AI in the Judiciary: New Guidelines for Judges and Their Chambers – EDRM.

The publication illustrates the old military maxim that “any ship can be a minesweeper – once.”

The authors are Hon. Herbert B. Dixon Jr., Hon. Allison H. Goddard, Maura R. Grossman, Hon. Xavier Rodriguez, Hon. Scott U. Schlegel & Hon. Samuel A. Thumma.  They wrote:

These Guidelines are intended to provide general, non-technical advice about the use of artificial intelligence (“AI”) and generative artificial intelligence (“GenAI”) by judicial officers and those with whom they work in state and federal courts in the United States.

The Guidelines point out that “when judicial officers obtain information, analysis, or advice from AI or GenAI tools, they risk relying on extrajudicial information and influences that the parties have not had an opportunity to address or rebut.”

“Judicial officers and those with whom they work should be aware that GenAI tools do not generate responses like traditional search engines. GenAI tools generate content using complex algorithms, based on the prompt they receive and the data on which the GenAI tool was trained.” Id. at 4.

Additionally:

Users must exercise vigilance to avoid becoming “anchored” to the AI’s response, sometimes called “automation bias,” where humans trust AI responses as correct without validating the results. Similarly, users of AI need to account for confirmation bias, where a human accepts the AI results because they appear to be consistent with the beliefs and opinions the user already has.

The Guidelines warn that “there may be good reason to retain, or to disable or delete, the prompt history after each session.”

They also caution against potential AI bias.

The authors suggest that some use cases are for: legal research; drafting routine administrative orders; searchimg and summarizing depositions, briefs, and exhibits; creating timelines; and for editing or proofreading.  Id. at 6. The Guidelines provide a number of other possibilities. Id. at 7.

However:  “As of February 2025, no known GenAI tools have fully resolved the hallucination problem, i.e., the tendency to generate plausible-sounding but false or inaccurate information.”  Id. at 7.

EDRM has published a Repository of Judicial Standing Orders Including AI Segments.

See also A Review of Sedona’s “Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Practice of Law” by The Hon. Xavier Rodriguez (Sep. 27, 2023).

EDRM has posted Hon. Ralph Artigliere (ret.), Ethical AI Guideposts for Lawyers Using Generative AI – EDRM (Oct. 31, 2023).