Explore the evidence

One atlas. Four different questions.

AI responsibility separates specific AI material from baseline duties. Client funds addresses advance fees, consultations, retainers, earning, and refunds. The filterable authority ledger compares documents across states and topics. Legal market and Federal preserve the statistical and national layers.

Read carefully

Four layers, kept deliberately distinct.

The atlas separates binding rules, advisory interpretation, fee and client-property treatment, and economic measures. A source’s authority and scope matter as much as its headline.

01

AI responsibility

AI-specific opinions, rules, guidance, and cases are shown alongside the baseline professional-conduct source. Advisory guidance is labeled and does not become binding merely because it is official.

02

Client funds and fees

The view distinguishes advance fees, security retainers, flat fees, true availability retainers, and up-front consultation payments. A completed consultation may earn its agreed reasonable fee, while pre-meeting custody and cancellation or no-show retention remain jurisdiction- and agreement-specific.

03

Legal-market economics

The 2022 Economic Census describes the Legal Services industry; May 2025 BLS OEWS describes wage-and-salary lawyer jobs. “Not published” means suppressed or unavailable here, never zero.

04

Federal context

National procedural, statutory, model-rule, banking, and statistical sources are grouped together while making clear that private-lawyer licensing and trust-account regulation remain principally state-based.

Billing dynamics

A faster task does not answer how a client should be billed.

Trust-account treatment asks who owns the money now. Billing method asks how the fee is calculated. Reasonableness asks whether the charge is permissible. AI efficiency can affect all three conversations, but it does not collapse them into one rule.

National ethics guidance · 2024ABA Formal Opinion 512Explains that AI-assisted hourly billing must reflect time actually spent, while fixed or contingent fees remain subject to reasonableness and agreement requirements. Fee authority · VirginiaLegal Ethics Opinion 1901A focused state authority on AI efficiency, actual-time hourly billing, and value-based fee analysis. Legal task efficiency · 2024Building a Better LawyerA controlled legal-task experiment found about a 30% time reduction for AI highlighting, without measured quality loss in that task. Billable-hour organization · 2012Salaried Lawyers and Billable HoursA sociology-of-work account of billable hours as both a billing and labor-control mechanism; the study is Australian, so U.S. application is interpretive.

Source ledger

Primary links, visible limits.

Government data

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2025 OEWS

State employment, mean and median annual wage, and location quotient for lawyers (SOC 23-1011).

Open the official BLS state estimates

Government data

U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census

Revenue, firms, establishments, payroll, and employment for NAICS 5411 Legal Services, subject to publication and disclosure rules.

Open Census table EC2254BASIC

Map boundaries

U.S. Census Bureau, 2025 Cartographic Boundary Files

The geographic layer is generated from the Census Bureau’s 1:20,000,000 state boundary shapefile.

Open the official boundary-file page

Authority review

Rules first, interpretation second

Each record labels the binding rules, decisions, opinions, and official guidance located in the review, including scope limits. Not every jurisdiction publishes the same combination of sources, and the atlas does not manufacture multiplicity. Where the controlling rule was not separately linked, the record says so rather than substituting an unrelated source.

AI authority review completed August 13, 2026. Billing and trust-account review completed August 14, 2026.

Source domains

Official does not always end in .gov

Many state bars and lawyer-disciplinary bodies are official regulators but publish on issuer-controlled .org domains. Those sources are labeled by issuing body; non-issuer commentary is excluded from the authority map.