Wigs and wires: assemblage governance and the professional legal ethics of generative AI

Generative AI (GenAI) has moved from speculative disruption to routine mediation of legal work, yet the professional ethics frameworks governing lawyers remain anchored in a person-centred model that treats technology as a normatively transparent instrument. This article argues that such anthropocentrism is structurally incomplete once generative systems co-produce legal outputs, and that completing it requires a theoretically grounded shift toward assemblage governance. Drawing on Verbeek’s technological mediation theory, Latour’s actor-network account of inscription and black-boxing, and Hildebrandt’s jurisprudence of accountability-by-design, the article demonstrates why purely actor-centric professional duties (competence, candour, confidentiality, supervision) cannot be consistently discharged without institutional governance of the socio-technical pipeline through which legal work is now generated. A qualitative, theory-driven comparison of bar instruments across nine jurisdictions - the United States, Canada, England and Wales, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and Czechia, reveals a meaningful divergence between common-law regimes that reinterpret existing duties and EU civil-law instruments that increasingly codify system-level obligations. The article proposes a two-tier normative model: preserving the lawyer’s non-delegable duty of reason-giving while adding proportionate, auditable governance obligations (procurement due diligence, privacy-by-configuration, provenance infrastructure, and incident response architecture) for the assemblage through which those reasons are produced.