This edition of Always Appealing returns to the question of how lawyers should use generative AI, now with new guidance from the WSBA, recent Washington Court of Appeals decisions, and emerging local court rules. His central point is clear: AI may be useful, but it does not replace a lawyer’s duty to think critically, protect client information, verify legal authority, and exercise independent judgment. Recent cases involving false citations show how quickly AI can create ethical and procedural problems when attorneys rely on it without checking the work. Bartels offers a practical answer that may sound simple but remains essential: check every citation and make sure the authority actually supports the point being made.

Mary Sakaguchi steps into the role of KCBA President with a career shaped by service, collaboration, and a deep commitment to helping families through difficult transitions. Her family law practice has long been guided by the belief that the goal is not simply to “win,” but to help clients and families move forward with fairness, care, and dignity. That same philosophy is reflected in her extensive volunteer work, from championing KCBA’s low-bono family law program to supporting ELAP, King County Collaborative Law, and statewide efforts to expand access to the Collaborative Law process. As incoming president, Sakaguchi brings a collaborative and intentional leadership style to KCBA, along with a clear focus on access to justice, community service, and the organization’s continued impact.

Eric Gillett examines what happens when a client reveals damaging facts just before mediation, a moment that can quickly shift both strategy and ethical obligations. The piece explains why lawyers must avoid both over-disclosure and strategic denial, focusing instead on the line between permissible advocacy and material deception. Gillett walks through how Washington’s professional rules apply when new information affects prior statements, mediation briefs, discovery responses, or the lawyer’s ability to continue negotiating honestly. He offers the following guidance: counsel the client immediately, reassess the record, stop relying on false facts, preserve lawful negotiating space, and withdraw if the client insists on using the lawyer’s services to mislead.

The right receiver can shape the outcome of a distressed business long before the legal process is complete, as Al Davis explains. The piece draws an important distinction between receivers who primarily manage financial or legal administration and operational receivers who bring executive leadership experience to stabilize a company in real time. In complex business receiverships, that operational background provides the opportunity to either manage decline or preserve value. Davis encourages attorneys to look beyond general distressed-asset experience and consider how a receiver’s specific background, leadership style, and business judgment align with the needs of the case.

Louisiana v. Callais is a major turning point in voting rights law. Molly Peach Matter argues that the Supreme Court’s silence on the Purcell principle revealed how selectively it has been applied. She traces how Purcell has been used for decades to keep challenged election rules in place, even when lower courts found those rules discriminatory or unconstitutional. In Callais, however, the Court intervened in an active election dispute without relying on Purcell, raising serious questions about whether the principle was ever neutral in practice. Matter frames the decision as a profound threat to the Voting Rights Act and to the ongoing work of protecting equal political participation in a multiracial democracy.

As the incoming President of the King County Bar Association, let me introduce myself.

Article I, section 10 of the Washington State Constitution guarantees its residents access to the Courts. However, “access” does not mean that there can be no limitations on that access. Thus, in 1909, the Washington Legislature adopted what now appears as RCW 2.28.010, which authorizes Washington trial courts…to enjoin a party from engaging in litigation upon a ‘specific and detailed showing of a pattern of abusive and frivolous litigation.’”[1]
 

“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”
— Mahatma Gandhi

The efficacy of communicative exchanges between a message originator and an intended audience is substantially mediated by the linguistic architecture through which informational content is transmitted. Lexical selection, syntactic complexity, semantic accessibility, and the degree of alignment between speaker and audience discourse conventions collectively influence the recipient’s cognitive receptivity, interpretive fluency, and ultimate susceptibility to attitudinal modification. Consequently, communicators who employ unnecessarily ornate, ceremonially formal, or institutionally coded language frequently undermine the very persuasive objectives such linguistic choices are ostensibly intended to advance.

For the last several years, we’ve been regularly reading about lawyers getting into hot water by citing AI-generated hallucinated cases to courts. In a recent federal court case in the Northern District of Mississippi, lawyers from both sides were removed from Withers v. City of Aberdeen and fined for citing AI-generated fake cases in court filings.