Regulators are in a hurry. Recent moves like Florida's mandatory AI verification requirement reflect a widespread assumption that faster rulemaking equals better protection. The unpopular take is that restraint, not speed, may be the smarter strategy here.
This is analysis and opinion, not reporting. But the pattern is unmistakable. Legislatures and bar associations are rushing to impose oversight mechanisms on artificial intelligence use before the technology itself has stabilized. The impulse is understandable. Lawyers using unreliable AI summaries to brief judges creates real problems. No one wants hallucinated case law cited in court filings. Speed feels like the responsible move.
It probably isn't.
History suggests that premature regulation often calcifies bad choices. When regulators move quickly, they tend to lock in assumptions based on current technology rather than anticipated developments. Rules written for today's AI systems may become absurdly unfit the moment the underlying technology shifts, yet those rules become politically difficult to modify.
Consider what we don't know yet about AI's trajectory. The capabilities, limitations, and failure modes of these systems are still being discovered. A regulation mandating "reasonable verification" of AI work makes intuitive sense until deployment reveals that verification itself requires specialized expertise most practitioners don't possess. Rules demanding human review create new bottlenecks without solving the underlying accuracy problem. Requirements that seem straightforward in committee become logistically nightmarish in practice.
There's also a tendency in fast-moving regulatory environments to impose solutions that sound good but produce theater rather than safety. Mandatory checklists. Certification requirements. Documentation protocols. These compliance measures make everyone feel protected while often just redistributing risk rather than reducing it. A lawyer who checks a box certifying they've reviewed their AI output hasn't necessarily done better work; they've just created paper evidence of effort.
The alternative approach is more modest: establish clear liability frameworks without prescribing exactly how firms must prevent problems. If lawyers face meaningful consequences for presenting false information to courts, regardless of whether that false information came from AI or human error, the incentive structure already pushes toward caution. We don't need to tell people how to be careful; we just need to ensure that carelessness costs something.
This isn't an argument against oversight. It's an argument for patience in designing it.
The legal profession has a track record of adapting technology thoughtfully when given time. Email adoption, document automation, and practice management software all eventually found equilibrium without comprehensive federal mandates governing their use. Lawyers figured out what worked and what created liability. Professional norms and malpractice exposure shaped behavior more effectively than preemptive rules could have.
Fast regulation also creates a particular problem in multi-jurisdictional practice. When Florida creates one AI accountability standard, other states will feel pressure to match it or create alternatives. Within a few years, practitioners managing national dockets face a patchwork of incompatible requirements, each adopted hastily and each difficult to revise later. This fragmentation harms the very predictability that good regulation should provide.
The harder sell is acknowledging that some harms will occur during any period of regulatory restraint. Bad outcomes will happen. Courts may rely on flawed AI summaries before rules can stop it. But those visible failures often produce better information than hypothetical precautions. They demonstrate, conclusively, where actual risk lives.
The case for slower rulemaking isn't that regulation is unnecessary. It's that regulation that addresses specific observed failures, rather than speculation about future ones, tends to be both more effective and less likely to create unintended consequences.