The ABA's December 2025 Year 2 Report is unequivocal: the legal profession has moved from debating whether to adopt AI to determining how to deploy it responsibly. Five sitting judges published guidance explicitly endorsing AI for core litigation tasks, including summarizing depositions, generating case timelines, and verifying citation accuracy. These aren't suggested efficiencies. They're baseline expectations.

Yet that same report acknowledges a fundamental problem: no known generative AI tool has solved hallucination. The technology mandates human verification of every output. The ABA warns specifically against "automation bias"—the tendency to accept AI-generated work without critical review—and states unequivocally that AI cannot replace human judgment.

This creates an unavoidable paradox for practitioners: ethical competence may require using tools that ethical practice prohibits you from trusting. Where does that leave the profession?