Law Society Guidance

AI Rules for Canadian Lawyers: The Last Click Is Yours

Juris · September 25, 2026 · 5 min read

Read the law society guidance on generative AI and one idea keeps coming back. The tool is never responsible for anything. The lawyer who signs is. None of that is a reason to stay away from AI. It is a description of who owns the result, and it is the idea Juris is built on.

What the regulators ask

Treat what AI produces as a draft that needs a supervisor. Alberta:

“Treat any Gen AI output as a first draft only. Consider anything generated by Gen AI as being produced by a law student who requires supervision.”

Law Society of Alberta, The Generative AI Playbook, last updated February 2026

Check it yourself. Ontario:

“Always independently verify any information produced by generative AI that you intend to rely on. The verification process should be completed by a human being, not the AI system itself.”

Law Society of Ontario, Generative AI: Your professional obligations, April 10, 2024

Keep privileged information out of tools that cannot protect it. Ontario again:

“Where the generative AI system lacks appropriate confidentiality, security, and retention safeguards, do not input confidential, privileged, proprietary, or potentially identifying client information in the system.”

Law Society of Ontario, Generative AI: Your professional obligations, April 10, 2024

And where a court asks, say when AI wrote part of a filing. The Federal Court's notice of May 7, 2024 requires a declaration in the first paragraph when documents submitted to it include content created or generated by AI, and says a declaration, in and of itself, will not attract an adverse inference. Other courts and tribunals set their own rules, so check the practice directions of the body you appear before.

How Juris answers each one

A draft stays a draft until you approve it

Export a Juris draft to PDF or Word before a lawyer has approved it and every page is stamped UNVERIFIED, with a banner saying it has not been reviewed by a lawyer and is not for filing or service until it is. The stamp comes off when you approve the draft, or when you confirm at export that you have checked it.

Supervision built into the workflow

A firm can flag a document for partner review. Until it is approved, Juris will not file it to the case or publish it to the client portal. That is the student and supervisor relationship Alberta describes, enforced by the software instead of left to memory.

Your checking starts from a list

Juris checks the citations in its drafts against case-law databases and tells you which it could not find, so your own verification goes where it is needed.

Privileged documents stay out of the AI

A document can be marked privileged when you upload it, and a privileged document is not read by the AI at all.

The result is the one most lawyers want from AI: a faster first draft, and the last click still theirs.

Every regulator, in its own words

Our full guide quotes the Federal Court and nine law societies from their own documents, with a link to each one, and says where we found nothing.

Read the full guide, society by society

General information, not legal advice. Guidance changes, so open each source for its current version and check the rules of the court or tribunal you appear before. Every quotation here is copied from the body's own document, read on 25 September 2026.

Start with the checking. Paste a draft into the free citation checker, no signup. It does not tell you whether a case is still good law, so your own reading still comes first.

Open the free checkerStart free trial