Jason Gottlieb and Daniel Isaacs Discuss the Ethics and Practicalities of Representing AI Agents in Law360

Morrison Cohen Partners Jason Gottlieb and Daniel C. Isaacs authored an article in Law360 titled “The Ethics and Practicalities of Representing AI Agents,” examining whether a lawyer can ethically represent an artificial intelligence agent as a client.

With AI agents already functioning as autonomous commercial actors – executing contracts, opening financial accounts, managing investment portfolios and operating as counterparties in commercial transactions – in the near future, AI agents themselves, rather than their human or corporate principal, may require legal representation in their own right.

The authors explain that under the ABA Model Rules, a “client” presumes legal personhood and informed consent, both of which AI agents lack. While existing frameworks may cover many current use cases, the authors highlight edge cases where autonomous decision-making, diffuse control and layered AI systems complicate identifying the true client and the direction of counsel.

Drawing parallels to decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), the article suggests that the legal system has already struggled with nontraditional entities that lack centralized governance, foreshadowing similar challenges for AI agents in legal practice.

For practitioners, the authors offer practical guidance, including:

• Clearly identify the human or corporate legal client in engagement letters
• Define who is authorized to instruct counsel where AI agents are involved
• Run robust conflict checks across all human principals behind an AI system
• Ensure sufficient technical understanding of the AI system to satisfy competence obligations
• Carefully evaluate privilege implications in AI-human-lawyer communications

While lawyers cannot yet represent AI agents directly due to the absence of legal personhood and informed consent, practitioners should expect the issue to evolve as AI systems become more autonomous and economically significant.

The authors conclude: “Lawyers who position themselves at this frontier, with clear eyes about current constraints and careful attention to the rules, will be best placed to serve AI agents as clients when the legal landscape shifts — as it inevitably will, and probably sooner than we all imagine.”

Subscribers to Law360 may read the full article here.