The Truth About RPC 1.1 Competence and AI: NJ Attorneys Are Reading It Too Narrowly

Most New Jersey attorneys, when they think about RPC 1.1, picture the obvious failure mode: sloppy research, a missed deadline, a brief that misstates the law. Competence as damage control. What the rule actually contains is something more demanding, and more interesting, than that.

Comment 8 to Model Rule 1.1 (which NJ's version tracks closely) tells lawyers they must keep up with "changes in the law and its practice, including the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology." The NJ Supreme Court's 2016 amendment made that explicit. So the question for any NJ solo or small-firm attorney using AI right now isn't just "am I using this tool correctly?" It's also: "am I using it at all, where I reasonably should be?"

That second question makes a lot of practitioners uncomfortable, and understandably so.

What "Technological Competence" Actually Requires

The duty doesn't require you to become a software engineer or chase every new product announcement. What it does require is a good-faith working knowledge of tools that are genuinely relevant to your practice area. For a solo immigration attorney in Newark who's manually typing the same removal-of-conditions arguments into every brief, that standard is starting to mean something specific. For a small estate planning firm in Monmouth County that's still assembling will packages from scratch every time, same deal.

The NJSBA has not yet issued a formal ethics opinion squarely addressing AI and RPC 1.1, as of mid-2025. But the ABA's Formal Opinion 512 (2024) filled in some of that silence. It confirmed that the competence duty applies directly to generative AI use: attorneys must understand, at a functional level, how the tools they use work, what their failure modes are, and when human review is non-negotiable. NJ practitioners should treat that as highly persuasive authority while waiting for local guidance.

The Flip Side: When Not Using AI Becomes the Problem

This is the part most bar CLE programs skip over. The technology competence language in Rule 1.1 was drafted to run in both directions. If a particular AI tool would materially improve the accuracy or thoroughness of your work product, and you choose not to use it, not out of legitimate concern about confidentiality or reliability, but simply out of habit or resistance, that's a professional judgment call worth examining honestly.

Consider contract review. AI-assisted review tools now catch clause-level inconsistencies and missing indemnification carve-outs that a tired solo attorney at 10pm will sometimes miss. If you're doing volume transactional work and you've never seriously evaluated whether one of those tools belongs in your workflow, RPC 1.1 gives you a reason to look, not just a reason to be careful if you do.

This isn't a disciplinary landmine yet. But the direction of travel is clear. Courts and disciplinary authorities are paying attention to how attorneys use, misuse, and fail to use technology. The Texas hallucination sanctions cases from 2023 and 2024 showed what the "misuse" side looks like. The "failure to use" side will get its turn.

A Practical Competence Baseline for NJ Practitioners

If you're trying to gauge whether your current AI practices satisfy a reasonable reading of RPC 1.1, here's a useful frame. Ask yourself three things about any AI tool you're using or considering:

First, can you explain to a client, in plain English, what the tool does with their information? If you can't, you haven't yet done the vendor evaluation the rule implicitly requires.

Second, do you have a defined review step before anything AI-generated goes out under your name? Not a vague intention to "check it," but an actual workflow: who reviews, at what stage, against what standard. For solos, that's entirely on you.

Third, have you documented your decision to use (or not use) a particular tool for a particular task type, and why? That documentation habit won't protect you from every complaint, but it's evidence of the good-faith professional judgment RPC 1.1 calls for.

The NJSBA's Ethics Hotline (1-800-406-8594) is a genuinely underused resource here. If you have a specific AI workflow you're uncertain about, a brief call to get informal guidance is far cheaper than learning the answer the hard way. That's the most concrete next step available to you right now, and it costs nothing.