Take a general practice in a provincial town: two lawyers, one secretary, tenancy and employment work, a fair share of subsidised cases. Both lawyers have used a chatbot for a year or so to find case law and to get a first draft on paper. One of them started, the other followed, and the subscription sits on a private credit card.
On 27 July 2026 the Raad van Discipline in Den Bosch reprimanded a lawyer with this kind of practice. She worked alone. In two tenancy cases she had filed statements of defence with references to rulings that did not exist or that concerned quite different cases. The board found a breach of the core values of expertise and integrity and of conduct rule 8, which forbids a lawyer to give a court information she knows or ought to know is wrong. The measure was a reprimand with 1,250 euro in costs.
Two passages in the decision deserve more attention than the measure itself. The first is the reason the board stopped at a reprimand. The lawyer had no earlier disciplinary record, and when she wrote the documents in 2025, literacy in artificial intelligence was in the board's words not yet common property, while the recommendations of the Nederlandse Orde van Advocaten came later. Those recommendations were published at the end of 2025. It is hard to see how a lawyer who files an unchecked reference today could ask for the same leniency.
The second passage concerns confidentiality. The dean also complained that client data had gone into the tool. The board dismissed that part, because a suspicion alone is too little and the lawyer declared that she had entered no confidential data. She also declared that she had been unable to find out which tool she had used. A lawyer who can answer the dean's question from her own records does not depend on the benefit of the doubt.
What the Orde asks is short and applies to the office of two as much as to the firm of two hundred. Check every citation, ruling and fact by hand before use. Keep client data out of public models. Know where data is stored and processed, in which country, by which subcontractors and under what security. Draw up a policy for the whole firm and tell clients about it. Confidential information may go into a tool on one of two conditions: firm contractual safeguards, or a tool hosted and managed inside the office.
The usual response in a small practice is a promise to be careful. That promise fails for a plain reason. The checking happens, or does not happen, at eleven at night before a filing deadline, and nothing on paper shows afterwards which it was.
A better start is to decide, for each kind of work the office does, which route the data may take. Research on published case law and drafting without names or facts of the client can go through the online service of a model provider, on a business contract that the lawyers have read and that excludes training on their input. The Orde warns that the less one pays for a tool, the more data is likely to be used, so a free account fails the first condition. Files with client data either stay out, or go only into a service whose contract and data location the office has checked and written down. A model on a machine in the office is the second route the Orde names. For two lawyers that is seldom the first step, and it would relieve them of none of the duties above.
The route decision takes an afternoon. What follows is modest and has to be written down: a list of the tools in use with the contract and data location of each, one page of policy that both lawyers sign, a rule that every reference in a court document is opened and read at the source, and a paragraph in the engagement letter, which the Orde names as the place to tell the client. Training belongs on the list as well. The European Union Artificial Intelligence Act has required since 2 February 2025 that whoever deploys such systems takes measures to support the literacy of the people who use them, and a lawyer who subscribes to a tool for her practice is a deployer.
Of the 5,494 law firms in the Netherlands in 2025, 3,298 had one lawyer and 788 had two. The price of a wrong reference is known too: 1,250 euro and a reprimand in Den Bosch, and 2,315 euro in extra costs for the clients of a lawyer who quoted three paragraphs of a Hoge Raad ruling that do not exist, as a regional broadcaster reported in August 2026.
By next month the office should have four things in a folder: the list of tools with their contracts, the signed policy page, the checking rule with the first files that show it was followed, and the paragraph for the engagement letter. The AI Guys can help draw these up and test the tools on the office's own work. When a dean then asks which tool saw which data, the answer is in the folder.