New York’s Part 161 Will Reshape AI Use in Depositions | Esquire Deposition Solutions, LLC
New York’s Part 161 Will Reshape AI Use in Depositions | Esquire Deposition Solutions, LLC
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/new-york-s-part-161-will-reshape-ai-use-4249654/
Publish Date: 2026-05-27 14:04:00
Source Domain: www.jdsupra.com
Effective June 1, New York lawyers will be required to navigate a new rule governing the use of artificial intelligence technology by attorneys and parties who submit papers to New York state courts. In local jurisdictions that adopt the rule, all litigators who rely – or plan to rely – on generative AI tools to draft pleadings, prepare for depositions, and conduct motion practice will need to be especially vigilant that their work is free from hallucinated citations and fabrications of fact.
New Part 161. Use of Artificial Intelligence Technology strikes a permissive but accountability-focused posture. Attorneys may use AI tools to assist with court submissions, and no mandatory system-wide disclosure obligation attaches to that use. But Part 161 makes plain that an attorney who signs an AI-assisted court paper owns every word on the page – hallucinated citations and fabricated facts included. That requirement alone will reshape how New York lawyers prepare for, conduct, and summarize depositions for the indefinite future.
Part 161 makes plain that an attorney who signs an AI-assisted court paper owns every word on the page — hallucinated citations and fabricated facts included.
What Part 161 Does
Part 161 provides that “[e]very attorney or party who uses an artificial intelligence (AI) tool in preparing any paper submitted to this court is expected to understand that tool’s capabilities and limitations.”
“Artificial intelligence” is defined as:
a machine-based system that can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, make predictions, recommendations, or decisions influencing real or virtual environments, and that uses machine- and human-based inputs to perceive real and virtual environments, abstract such perceptions into models through analysis in an automated manner, and use model inference to formulate options for information or action.
The term “paper” means:
a brief, memorandum, affidavit, affirmation, pleading, or…
