AI Evidence and Authentication Rules Should Provide Clear Guidance

A new letter from Lawyers for Civil Justice to the Advisory Committee on Evidence Rules recommends that any new rules governing AI-generated evidence provide clear, practical guidance for courts and litigants while preserving meaningful adversarial testing. The full letter is available here.

LCJ’s letter focuses on draft Rules 707 and 901(c), which address two increasingly important issues: when AI-generated evidence should be admitted, and how parties should authenticate evidence that may have been fabricated through generative AI. LCJ supports a rules framework that is durable enough to evolve with technology, but specific enough to help courts assess reliability, authenticity, and whether AI-generated output can be tested effectively at trial.

In particular, LCJ asks the Committee to consider whether AI-specific reliability factors should appear in the rule text, how courts should address “black box” outputs, what threshold showing should be required when a party challenges evidence as AI-fabricated, and how the new rules should coordinate with existing authentication principles.

LCJ’s goal is a fair and workable evidentiary framework that keeps pace with technological change without sacrificing predictability, reliability, or the right to meaningful cross-examination.