The Courts With No AI Standing Order at All -- and Why That's Not the Same as No Risk

Written by the Citation Safe Research Desk · Reviewed by Andy Gaber, Founder — July 17, 2026

Part of: Court AI Standing Orders by Jurisdiction

The single largest category of federal courts, by the pillar’s own review of the Ropes & Gray tracker, is silence: most federal judges, in most districts, have not issued any AI-specific standing order at all.
The absence of a standing order does not remove any existing obligation. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11, 28 U.S.C. § 1927, and ordinary state professional-conduct rules all predate generative AI and apply to every filing regardless of whether a court has said anything about AI specifically.
Citation Safe’s tracked 49-case sanctions database is the clearest evidence for this: the large majority of those sanctions were imposed under a court’s inherent authority or Rule 11, not for violating a named AI standing order, because most of the sanctioning courts didn’t have one.
Treating “no AI order in this court” as “no AI risk in this court” is the single most consequential misreading of the standing-order landscape covered across this content series.

Why silence is the default, not the exception

The pillar’s review of the Ropes & Gray tracker found roughly 756 entries applicable to AI used in filings or drafting — a number that sounds substantial until it’s placed against the total number of sitting federal judges and district courts nationally. The honest reading of that count is that a meaningful minority of federal judges have addressed AI use in a standing order, local rule, or documented decision; the majority, across most districts, have not. This isn’t a criticism of those judges — AI-specific rulemaking is discretionary, and many judges may reasonably conclude that existing rules already cover the risk without a new procedural layer.

What governs a filing when no standing order exists

In the absence of any AI-specific order, the rules that governed filings before generative AI existed continue to govern them now, in full force:

Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11. Rule 11 requires that factual contentions have evidentiary support and that legal contentions be warranted by existing law or a non-frivolous argument for changing it. A citation to a case that doesn’t exist, or that doesn’t say what it’s cited for, fails this standard regardless of whether AI was involved in producing it — the rule doesn’t distinguish between a hallucinated citation and a citation an attorney simply got wrong through carelessness or misunderstanding.

28 U.S.C. § 1927. This statute allows a court to require an attorney who “multiplies the proceedings in any case unreasonably and vexatiously” to personally satisfy the excess costs, expenses, and attorneys’ fees reasonably incurred because of that conduct — a tool courts have available independent of any AI-specific rule, and one that can apply when opposing counsel has to spend time and resources chasing down fabricated authority.

State professional-conduct rules. Every attorney remains bound by their state bar’s rules of professional conduct, including duties of candor to the tribunal, regardless of what any specific court’s local rules say about AI. This is the authority underlying most bar referral outcomes documented in Citation Safe’s sanctions database, and it exists independent of any court’s own AI-specific rulemaking.

Every standing order discussed elsewhere in this cluster is explicit that it operates on top of these existing obligations, not in place of them. Judge Wang’s Colorado order states plainly that “all filings remain subject to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11, 28 U.S.C. § 1927, and applicable ethical rules” regardless of whether an AI certification was filed — meaning even courts with the most developed certification requirements treat those requirements as additive, not as the sole source of accountability.

The sanctions record proves the point directly

This isn’t an abstract legal argument — Citation Safe’s tracked 49-case sanctions database provides direct, documented evidence. Every sanctioned case in that database was sanctioned under a court’s inherent authority, Rule 11, or an equivalent state rule, not, in most instances, because a specific named AI standing order was violated. That’s because most of the courts in the tracked set — spanning federal district courts, a circuit court of appeals, state trial and appellate courts, and courts in four other countries — did not have an AI-specific standing order in place when the sanctioned filing was made. The sanctions happened anyway, under authority that predates AI-specific rulemaking entirely.

Why “no order” cases might actually carry more exposure, not less

There’s a case to be made that filing in a court with no AI-specific order carries comparable, or even higher, practical risk than filing in a certification-model court — not lower risk, as intuition might suggest. A certification-model order gives an attorney a concrete, bright-line compliance step: file the certificate, and the procedural gate is satisfied (even if the underlying accuracy question remains separately live). A court with no AI-specific order offers no equivalent bright line. The attorney’s only guide is the general, pre-existing duty of candor and accuracy — a standard that offers no procedural checkpoint to confirm compliance before the filing goes in, and no advance warning that AI use specifically is the kind of thing the court is watching for. The absence of a specific rule doesn’t lower the bar; it just removes the visible marker of where the bar is.

What this means for a filing workflow in a court with no AI-specific order

Do not treat a silent court as a lower-risk court. The obligations that produced every sanction in Citation Safe’s tracked database exist independent of any AI-specific rule, and apply with full force in courts that have said nothing about AI at all.
The absence of a compliance checkpoint means the burden is entirely on internal process. Without a certification requirement forcing a moment of explicit verification, a firm’s own workflow is the only thing standing between an AI-hallucinated citation and a filed brief.
Check for a rule before assuming there isn’t one. “No AI-specific order” should be a confirmed finding, not a default assumption — always check both the district’s local rules and the assigned judge’s own chambers rules before concluding no rule applies.
A mechanical, pre-filing verification step is the practical answer regardless of whether a standing order exists. It satisfies the underlying Rule 11 and professional-conduct obligations that apply everywhere, independent of whether a specific court has also layered a certification requirement on top.

Sources

Ropes & Gray, AI Court Order Tracker, category filter counts accessed 2026-07-16.
Judge Nina Y. Wang, Standing Order Regarding the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Court Filings, D. Colorado.
Citation Safe, Public AI Legal Sanction Case Database.

Citation Safe is a verification workflow tool, not legal advice. No attorney-client relationship is created. Human review is always required. Court rules change; always confirm current requirements against the specific court’s published rules before filing.

Check a brief before you file it →