The Lawyer's Oldest Duty: Truth-Telling Attorneys in the Age of AI and the Increasing Velocity of Falsehood

The age of AI may be a new frontier for humanity. But for the Virginia lawyer, it is simply a new tool for an ancient discipline: the relentless pursuit of truth.

A recent example from my practice makes the point. I represent a Virginia contractor who, like many in his trade, has taken a fifty-percent (50%) deposit at the beginning of a job for decades. A customer recently challenged this practice with a claim that Virginia law caps contractor deposits at 33%. Puzzled, my client posed the question to me. Given my twelve years of practice, I felt confident the customer was misinformed. Nonetheless, I attacked the claim the way every responsible attorney should: I went straight to the sources.

I first placed the claim into Lexis Protégé, which found no support for the customer's position anywhere in the Virginia Code. A Google search revealed the source of the customer's misgivings: a deceptive (likely AI-generated) website citing a Virginia Code section that has nothing whatsoever to do with deposits. This demonstrably false information had already spread widely enough to deceive a reasonable business owner and his customer, nearly causing a needless dispute between them.

This is the inflection point we face — and it requires us to practice epistemology.

Most attorneys think of epistemology as philosophy, not law. But epistemology is simply the study of how we know what we know. And now, more than ever, it is a core competency for legal practice.

For decades, lawyers could outsource epistemology to trusted institutions: official legal databases, bar associations, court reporters, established publishers. These gatekeepers had reputational stake. We could trust the source because we understood how it became authoritative.

That ecosystem is broken. Today, plausible-sounding websites outrank official statutory text. AI generates fake case citations — and not in the abstract. In Mata v. Avianca, Inc., 678 F. Supp. 3d 443 (S.D.N.Y. 2023), two New York attorneys were sanctioned under Rule 11 after filing a brief built on six entirely fabricated cases produced by ChatGPT — complete with invented quotations, fictitious dockets, and the names of real federal judges falsely attributed as their authors. They had abandoned the most basic epistemological discipline: verifying that the authorities they cited actually existed.

This is not another blog post about earning more CLE credits or mastering new software. It is a fundamental shift in what responsible legal practice means. Every factual claim requires epistemological rigor: Where does this come from? Who verified it? What incentives shaped it? Can I trace it to an authoritative primary source?

In this pursuit of truth, AI is both weapon and shield.

The same tools that generate false legal authority can verify truth. Lexis Protégé, Claude, and similar systems can cross-reference statutes, identify contradictions, surface actual statutory language, and help us distinguish between what a source claims versus what the law says. But only if we use them with discipline and always verify against primary sources.

For several decades now, legal educators have admonished students from the earliest days of their legal studies not to use internet sources like Google and Wikipedia. However, as the Mata case shows, the attorney who casually accepts an AI generated brief has committed a similarly elementary breach of duty. By contrast, the attorney who understands AI and uses it as a tool — diligently cross-checking every sentence against primary sources and authority — has evolved.

Lawyers have always been gatekeepers of truth in commerce and governance. That responsibility hasn't changed. What has changed is the velocity of falsehood, and the tools now available to combat it.

Virginia's Legal Epistemology: A Historical Precedent

This commitment to epistemological rigor is not new to Virginia lawyers. Two centuries ago, two Virginians — Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall — bitter political rivals with profoundly different visions of the Republic, would have, nonetheless, agreed on a few foundational principles: that the law derives its authority from the timeless axiom that like cases should be treated alike and that jurists should be moved only by rigorous reasoning based on prior precedent, not by the pronouncements of power or the drifts of popular custom.

That shared discipline was not coincidence. It was inheritance. Jefferson and Marshall studied under the same teacher.

George Wythe, America's first law professor and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, mentored Jefferson from 1762 to 1765, drilling him in Coke on Littleton and the rigorous English common-law tradition. Years later, in 1780, Marshall sat in the same Williamsburg lecture hall, keeping a 175-page notebook of Wythe's lectures on Blackstone before going on to become the fourth Chief Justice of the United States. The William & Mary Law School honors them together as the Marshall-Wythe School of Law for good reason: Wythe trained both the father of the Declaration and the architect of judicial review. Jefferson would later call Wythe his 'second father.'

Jefferson, late in life, reflected on his early days studying law under Wythe as a time when he was 'bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led, & bearding every authority which stood in their way.' (Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, Feb. 10, 1814, Founders Online, National Archives.) That epistemic courage — following reason over authority — became foundational to American law.

But Jefferson's most potent articulation came in his vision for the University of Virginia. Writing to historian William Roscoe in 1820, Jefferson insisted: 'We are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.' (Jefferson to William Roscoe, Dec. 27, 1820, Founders Online, National Archives.) This was not mere rhetoric; it was a recipe for truth-seeking and an assertion that the antidote to falsehood is not censorship but rigorous reasoning.

Unsurprisingly, Jefferson's political adversary John Marshall adopted the same epistemological discipline. Though the two were bitter rivals, Marshall grounded the judiciary's authority in the same commitment to rigorous reasoning. In Marbury v. Madison (1803), Marshall held that the Court's duty is to uphold the Constitution by interpreting it for itself — not bound by interpretations of other branches, but tracing each conclusion back to the constitutional text. 'It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is,' Marshall wrote. He then grounded that duty not in judicial power but in textual fidelity: 'A constitution is, in fact, and must be, regarded by the judges, as a fundamental law.' (Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803).)

The Adversarial Process as a Truth-Finding Engine

It speaks to the power of these timeless principles — grounding authority in precedent, applying rigorous reasoning, tracing every conclusion back to the fundamental law — that two political enemies, trained by the same Virginia mentor, arrived at and remained faithful to them throughout their careers. But the deeper lesson is what happened when those principles were tested against each other in open court.

The defining stress test came in 1807. President Jefferson had publicly declared his former Vice President, Aaron Burr, 'guilty of treason' in an address to Congress — without a grand jury indictment and based largely on the testimony of General James Wilkinson, a man Jefferson and his cabinet privately knew to be a paid agent of Spain. The case landed before Chief Justice Marshall, sitting as circuit judge in Richmond.

What followed was the adversarial system at its most uncompromising. Marshall, facing the political fury of a sitting President with both houses of Congress at his back, issued a subpoena to Jefferson himself — the first federal subpoena ever issued to a sitting President — holding that the Sixth Amendment's guarantee of compulsory process must be regarded as 'sacred.' Marshall then construed the Constitution's Treason Clause narrowly, requiring proof of an overt act of levying war witnessed by two persons, and on September 1, 1807, the jury acquitted Burr.

Jefferson fumed for years over what he called Marshall's 'twistifications.' But what Jefferson saw as judicial obstruction was, in fact, the adversarial system performing the precise function the Founders designed it to perform: forcing the most powerful political actor in the country to prove, with evidence, before a jury, in an open courtroom, what he had already declared as truth from the highest office in the land. Popular conviction, even presidential conviction, was not enough. Reason, evidence, and the constitutional text were the only things that counted in Marshall's courtroom.

Like lawyers today, Jefferson and Marshall would have disagreed more often than they agreed. Nonetheless, in reaching their very different conclusions, they would have zealously done their duty to faithfully apply reason to both text and precedent. That adversarial process has been the hallmark of the American judicial system and its primary strength for centuries. It has also gifted us with hundreds of thousands of lawyers who, if we let them, are prepared to rigorously examine and determine truth in an age when technology can generate plausible falsehood at scale.

The Compass for an Age of Manufactured Reality

In an age where the velocity of falsehood seems to be constantly accelerating — where a deceptive website can nearly fracture the relationship between a Virginia contractor and his customer, and where six fabricated cases can find their way into a federal brief — we should let that tradition become our compass. The future belongs to attorneys who practice rigorous epistemology: who augment themselves with AI, understand its strengths and blind spots, and remain bound by oath to the disciplined pursuit of truth — not engagement metrics, not plausibility, not convenience.

In our new AI-driven reality, misinformation generation seems to proceed unchecked. In such an age, AI-augmented lawyers — grounded in reason and forged in the crucible of our adversarial process — are even more indispensable than ever to the scrupulous determination of truth. Jefferson and Marshall, who disagreed about nearly everything that mattered in the early Republic, nevertheless agreed about how to find the truth. As Virginia lawyers who are beneficiaries of their legacy, so should we.