Architectural Enforcement of Professional Responsibility in AI-Assisted Legal Work

The increasing use of artificial intelligence in legal practice has intensified long-standing concerns around professional responsibility, verification, confidentiality, and accountability. Recent sanctions and ethics opinions suggest that reliance on behavioral guidance alone is insufficient to prevent predictable failure modes under real-world conditions. This paper examines how existing legal ethics obligations implicitly require enforceable technical constraints and explores an architectural approach in which AI-assisted systems are designed to refuse unauthorized authority, enforce verification prior to reliance, preserve human accountability, and avoid learning from client data. The analysis does not propose new ethical standards, but demonstrates how system architecture can operationalize compliance with existing professional responsibilities in a durable and inspectable manner.