The Steve Miller Band told a tidy little crime story in 1976: a young couple with nothing better to do help themselves to a pile of money that is not theirs and disappear down the highway, cheerfully unbothered by the people they left holding the bill. The whole thing is set to a groove so easygoing you can almost forget it is a song about grabbing the cash and vanishing.
I have written before about what AI-powered litigation should actually cost a client, and about the firms that capture the efficiency and bill as though nothing changed. This post is about something narrower, and in some ways more dangerous. It is not about the invoice. It is about the sentence in the pitch — the moment “we use AI” stops being a description and becomes an advertising claim, with everything that follows from that.
It Sounds Good in the Pitch
Walk into almost any beauty contest for legal work today and you will hear it: the firm is AI-powered, AI-forward, more efficient than ever. Notice what that sentence is doing. It is not a disclosure and it is not a description of a workflow. It is a representation made to induce a purchase — which is a category the law already has a great deal to say about.If the efficiency is real and the client sees some of it, the claim is true and nobody has a problem.
If the efficiency is real and the client never sees a dime of it, the firm has made a statement that is accurate about itself and misleading about what the buyer is getting. The savings got grabbed, and they ran. The question is who, if anyone, is in a position to do something about it.
The Regulators Are on the Highway Too
Start with the Federal Trade Commission, because it has been the most active. Operation AI Comply launched in September 2024 as a coordinated set of enforcement actions against companies using artificial intelligence to supercharge deceptive conduct. It survived a change of administration and then accelerated; the FTC brought more than a dozen AI-washing matters in 2025 alone, and by April 2026 the Chairman was defending the program in congressional testimony as pro-innovation rather than anti-technology.
The agency has not needed a special AI statute for any of it. It relies on the longstanding prohibition on unfair and deceptive acts and practices in Section 5 of the FTC Act. The recurring targets map uncomfortably well onto legal marketing: present-tense capability claims with nothing behind them, performance claims never actually tested, and implied capabilities that do not exist. Most relevant here, the enforcement has reached business-to-business marketing, not just consumer-facing claims. The substantiation obligation does not relax because the buyer is sophisticated.
But Can Anyone Actually Reach a Law Firm?
Here is where it gets more interesting than the usual warning, and where I want to be careful, because the answer is genuinely unsettled. Whether the FTC would assert jurisdiction over a law firm’s marketing is a real question, and I am not aware of it being squarely tested for claims of this kind. A firm inclined to gamble might take some comfort there. It should not take much.
Arizona has its own Consumer Fraud Act, and several features of it point the wrong way for a confident firm. The Act reaches deception and misrepresentation made in connection with the sale or advertisement of merchandise, and “merchandise” is defined to include services and intangibles rather than just goods. Our courts have applied the Act to sophisticated, arm’s-length commercial negotiations, not only to ordinary retail consumers — which is to say that a general counsel selecting outside counsel is not obviously outside its reach. And a separate statute makes it a criminal offense to knowingly publish a false or misleading advertisement about services with intent to sell them.
The best argument the other way is not that lawyers are exempt from honesty. It is structural. Our Supreme Court has held for more than sixty years that it holds inherent and exclusive authority to supervise the practice of law, and that the legislature cannot curtail that supervisory power. A firm would argue that attorney regulation is a comprehensive scheme occupying the field, the way the Securities Act was held to displace the Consumer Fraud Act rather than run alongside it. The counterargument is Green Acres Trust, where the court refused to let the existence of a professional licensing board narrow the Attorney General’s consumer-fraud authority. Whether bar regulation is more like the Securities Act or more like the licensing board is, as far as I can tell, an open question in Arizona.
I would not want to be the firm that finds out. And notice that the uncertainty only concerns who gets to bring the case — not whether the conduct was deceptive.
And the Bar Is Watching the Off-Ramp
Which brings us to the regulator nobody in this conversation is watching, and the one whose jurisdiction is not in doubt at all. Lawyers answer to a second set of rules that most businesses do not. Communications about a lawyer’s services may not be false or misleading — and “efficient” is misleading when the efficiency is real for the firm and invisible to the client. Our Supreme Court has said plainly that legal advertising warrants closer scrutiny than ordinary product advertising, precisely because a consumer choosing a lawyer cannot evaluate the product and bears far greater consequences for choosing wrong. It has also made clear that a lawyer’s duty of honesty is not confined to the attorney-client relationship; it follows the lawyer into business conduct generally.
Layer on the duty to charge only reasonable fees, which does not evaporate because a machine did part of the work, and the exposure runs on two tracks at once: a business making a deceptive claim, and a licensed professional making a misleading one. A firm worried about the FTC has been watching the wrong horizon. The bar needs no novel jurisdictional theory, no federal sweep, and no test case. It needs a complaint.
The Honest Version Is Also the Better Business
None of this is an argument against using AI, or against saying so. It is an argument for making the claim true before you make it. If a firm is genuinely more efficient, the honest move is to let the client feel it — in a lower bill, a fixed or capped fee, or scope delivered for less than it used to cost. That is not charity. It is the version of the pitch that survives the follow-up question, which is the one I keep encouraging clients to ask: does your firm’s AI use translate into lower fees for me?
The couple in the song got away because nobody was watching closely enough. That is no longer the safe assumption. The firms that will be fine are the ones with nothing to run from — the ones whose efficiency claims are things they can prove, because the client is holding the savings rather than the bill.This post is part of an ongoing series on AI, law-firm economics, and what businesses should expect from the lawyers they hire. An earlier post laid out in detail what AI-powered litigation should actually cost a client.
A Word About Silver Cain
Silver Cain PLC represents businesses in complex commercial and real estate litigation in Arizona and beyond. Much of our work involves advising companies on what their advertising and their contracts actually commit them to — a question we think law firms should be willing to answer about their own marketing before they answer it for anyone else. If the questions in this post are relevant to your business, or to the firms you retain, we are glad to have that conversation.Leon Silver is an AV-rated trial lawyer at Silver Cain PLC, focused on commercial and real property disputes since 1989. Reach him at lsilver@silvercain.com.
