Federal Judge AI Standing Orders: 2026 Inventory of Disclosure and Verification Requirements
A federal judge AI standing order is a per-judge rule that governs how attorneys appearing before that judge must disclose, verify, or limit generative AI use in court filings. The first federal standing order addressing generative AI in court filings appeared in 2023, shortly after the sanctions order in Mata v. Avianca. Within a year, judges in multiple federal districts had entered their own orders. The texts vary. The animating concern does not.
The orders are, in the aggregate, a working response to a failure mode the bench has now observed enough times to name. The orders do not all say the same thing. They do, however, fall into a small number of operational categories. A litigator preparing a filing in federal court today is reading a standing order that belongs to one of those categories, or to a combination of them.
This piece inventories the categories. It explains what each one requires operationally. It identifies the artifact a firm produces to satisfy the most demanding category. It does not name specific judges by name attached to specific orders, because the orders are revised, withdrawn, and supplemented often enough that any name-specific list would be wrong by the time it was published. The patterns are stable. The names attached to the patterns are not.
Why the orders exist
The proximate cause is well documented. Beginning in mid-2023, federal dockets began to register briefs containing citations that did not exist. The pattern was the same in each: a draft passed through a generative model, the model produced reporter-form citations that resolved to nothing in the named volumes, and the attorney filed the brief without confirming the cites against the reporter. The reported sanctions are the surface of a larger pool of corrected filings.
The standing-order response is the bench's preferred mechanism because it is local, fast, and within the supervising judge's inherent authority. A standing order does not require a rules amendment or a circuit-wide policy. It imposes a duty on counsel appearing before that judge, in that courtroom, on every filing, independent of Rule 11.
The orders read, in the aggregate, as an effort to make verification an affirmative, recorded obligation rather than an assumed one. The duty to confirm a citation has always existed in principle. The standing orders make the duty operational and the record contemporaneous.
Category 1: Disclosure of AI use
The first and most common category is the disclosure order. The order requires counsel to disclose, in or alongside the filing, whether a generative AI tool was used in drafting. The disclosure may be required for any AI use, or it may be triggered only by AI-assisted generation of legal authority.
The operational question for the firm is the trigger. A literal reading of a broad disclosure order would require disclosure whenever any model touched any sentence of the draft. A narrower reading limits the trigger to AI-generated case law or quotations. Different orders draw the line differently. The partner reading the assigned judge's order needs to know which line that order draws.
The disclosure category is operationally light. The partner adds a sentence or short paragraph to the filing, or attaches a short declaration. The substantive risk is not in the disclosure itself but in what the disclosure implies about the verification step behind it. A disclosure that AI was used, paired with an unverified citation, is worse than no disclosure at all. Disclosure without verification is an admission.
Category 2: Certification of verification
The second category is the more operationally demanding one. The order requires counsel to certify that every citation in the filing has been verified against its reporter. The certification may be required only where AI was used, or it may be required on every filing regardless of how the brief was drafted.
The certification is an affirmative statement under the attorney's signature. It says, in substance, that each citation in the brief has been confirmed to exist in the reporter named, that the cited material has been confirmed to appear in the opinion at the cited page, and that the attorney accepts responsibility for the accuracy of the citations on that basis.
This category is the one a firm cannot satisfy by memory or by an email thread. The certification is a statement made to the court. The statement is more credible, and more defensible later, if the firm can point to a contemporaneous structured record of the verification work. The record is the artifact that turns a certification into a defensible certification.
A Verification Certificate is built for this category. The certificate lists each citation in the draft, the verification status for each, the source records consulted, a SHA-256 hash of the certificate content, a public token URL, and a timestamp. The attorney signs the certification to the court after reading the certificate. The certificate sits in the matter file. If the court later asks how the verification was performed, the answer is a document, not a recollection.
Category 3: Prohibitions and restricted uses
The third and least common category is the prohibition or restriction order. A small number of judges have entered orders prohibiting the use of generative AI in particular submission types, or restricting AI use to specified categories of work, or requiring that any AI-generated text be flagged as such within the brief.
Restrictions in this category are narrow. They tend to address specific submission types, specific kinds of authority, or specific stages of the litigation. A restriction on AI use in drafting a motion for summary judgment is different from a restriction on AI use in any filing. The text of the order controls.
The category is uncommon because outright prohibition is difficult to enforce and difficult to draw. The institutional posture across the federal bench has converged on the view that AI use is permitted and verification is the affirmative obligation. Pure prohibition orders are outliers. Restriction orders that draw lines around specific uses are more durable, and a firm preparing a filing in a courtroom that has issued one needs to read the order with care.
What the attorney does on the morning of a filing
The operational workflow for compliance is short. The partner reads the assigned judge's standing order before the brief is finalized. The partner identifies which categories the order implicates: disclosure, certification, prohibition, or some combination. The partner decides what the filing needs to contain and what record the firm needs to retain.
If the order requires disclosure, the partner drafts the disclosure language and confirms it accurately describes the role AI played in the drafting. If the order requires certification of verification, the firm runs a pre-filing citation check on the final draft. The scanner extracts the citations, resolves each one against reporter and public-record sources, and produces the Verification Certificate. The partner reads the certificate and confirms each citation is in a state the partner is willing to certify to the court.
If the certificate shows an unresolved citation, the brief is not yet ready to file. The partner returns the draft to the associate, the citation is fixed or removed, the scanner is run again, and a new certificate is produced against the corrected draft. The brief is filed only when the certificate the firm is willing to stand behind is the certificate the scanner has just generated.
The disclosure, if required, is attached to the filing. The certification, if required, is signed and attached. The Verification Certificate is retained in the matter file regardless of whether the order requires it to be attached. The certificate is the firm's record. The court is one possible audience. The malpractice carrier is another. The future reader who has not yet been identified is the third.
The certificate as the contemporaneous record
The standing orders are, read together, a request for a contemporaneous record. The court is not asking the bar to stop using AI; the ABA has reached the same conclusion. The court is asking the bar to prove, on a per-filing basis, that the verification step happened. The form the proof takes is up to the firm. The proof either exists or it does not.
A Verification Certificate is one form the proof can take. The certificate is structured. The hash is computed at generation. The timestamp is the timestamp at generation. The public token URL resolves to the same record. The certificate carries its own audit trail.
The standing-order landscape will continue to change. New orders will be entered, existing orders will be revised, and the aggregate posture of the federal bench will tighten or loosen as the underlying technology and the sanctions docket develop. The firm's defensible posture across all of those changes is the same: read the order, run the verification, retain the record. The Filing Risk Scanner runs the verification and produces the record. The partner signs the brief after reading the certificate.