Florida Now Requires You to Certify Your Citations Are Real. Here Is What That Means for Your Firm.

On May 28, 2026, the Florida Supreme Court issued Opinion SC2026-0673 and amended Florida Rule of General Practice and Judicial Administration 2.515(d)(2). The amendment takes effect June 15, 2026. It is short, and it changes the calculus for every firm filing in Florida.

Here is the rule in plain terms. Anyone who signs a document filed in any Florida court now represents that the legal authorities cited "exist and are accurately cited." That representation applies to attorneys and to self-represented parties. A court may sanction a filing that fails to meet it, after giving the signer notice and an opportunity to be heard. The sanctions on the table include reprimand, contempt, striking the document, dismissal of the proceeding, costs, and attorneys' fees.

What the rule does not say

The most important feature of this rule is what it leaves out. It does not require you to disclose that you used artificial intelligence. It does not ask which tool you used. It does not distinguish between a brief drafted by a partner and one drafted with a research assistant or a model.

That is deliberate. The Court was candid that the flood of hallucinated citations from generative AI drove the change. But instead of regulating the software, it regulated the result. The duty attaches to the output, not the tool. Your citations have to be real and accurate. How you got there is your business.

This is a sharper instrument than it first appears. A disclosure rule invites debate about what counts as AI, whether spell-check qualifies, and whether a particular workflow triggered the obligation. An accuracy rule sidesteps all of that. The question is binary. Either the cited authority exists and supports what you said it does, or it does not.

Why a statewide rule, and why now

For the past several months, Florida practitioners have been tracking a patchwork. The Eleventh Circuit issued an order. The Seventeenth issued a different one. The Fifteenth and others followed, each with its own disclosure language, its own certification form, and its own sanctions menu. A firm appearing across multiple counties had to keep five sets of rules straight.

The Court's commentary states that it adopted this amendment primarily to create a uniform, statewide replacement for those varied lower-court orders. One standard, applied everywhere, instead of a different rule in every circuit. If you practice in more than one Florida county, this is a simplification. It is also a tightening, because the standard now reaches every signer and every filing, not just those that happened to fall under a circuit order.

A note of caution on timing. The Court issued the order on its own motion, without a prior comment period, and has opened comments through August 11, 2026, with possible oral argument after. The rule is effective June 15 regardless. Watch whether the individual circuits formally rescind their administrative orders, because until they do, a belt-and-suspenders approach to any remaining local disclosure requirement is the safe posture.

This codifies a duty you already had

None of this is new in principle. The duty of candor to the tribunal already required accurate citations. A signature on a filing already meant something. What the amendment does is make the citation-accuracy representation explicit, put it in a rule with teeth, and extend it to self-represented parties who were never bound by the circuit orders.

If your firm has been treating AI as a compliance question rather than a productivity question, this rule asks nothing of you that you were not already doing. If it has not, June 15 is a deadline.

What to actually do

The rule is a representation. A representation is only as reliable as the process behind it. The work is not writing a policy that says "we verify citations." The work is building a verification step that sits between the draft and the filing, that a specific person owns, and that leaves a record.

Three questions to answer before June 15:

1. Who checks citations before a filing goes out, and is that step mandatory rather than discretionary? A verification habit that depends on whether someone remembered is not a process.
2. What does the check actually confirm? Existence is the floor. Accuracy is the standard. A case can be real and still not stand for the proposition you cited it for. The rule reaches both.
3. Can you show your work? If a citation is ever challenged, the question a court will ask is whether you had a reasonable process and followed it, not whether you used a particular tool. A firm that can produce its verification record is in a fundamentally different position than one offering an after-the-fact explanation.

That last point is the whole game. A governance program serves two purposes. It helps you follow the rule, and it lets you demonstrate that you followed the rule when someone asks. The second function is the one firms underbuild, and it is the one that matters when a filing is under scrutiny.

The bottom line

Florida just told every firm in the state that accurate citations are a signed promise, enforceable by sanction, regardless of how the document was produced. The firms that already treated AI use as something to govern rather than something to hide have very little to do. For everyone else, the move is not to write a disclosure. It is to build the verification step, assign it an owner, and make sure it produces a record. You have until June 15.

This article reflects publicly reported details of Opinion SC2026-0673 as of May 28, 2026 and is general information, not legal advice. Florida attorneys should review the operative rule text and any later guidance from the Florida Supreme Court or their local circuit before relying on this summary.