Partner
Attorney at Law (Germany)
AI in China: Practical Guidelines from the Shanghai Bar Association
- The Shanghai Bar Association has published its first AI practice guidelines
- Confidentiality, human oversight and due care are the key focuses
- AI remains a tool and is no substitute for professional judgement
- The guidelines also provide practical guidance for companies
In August 2026, the Shanghai Bar Association published detailed practice guidelines on the use of AI in legal advice. Although they are aimed at lawyers, they contain key compliance principles that are also relevant to companies. In particular, the requirements regarding confidentiality, human oversight and quality checks on AI outputs provide valuable guidance for business practice.
Practical Guidelines of the Shanghai Bar Association
In addition to the financial sector, the legal sector has also issued its own regulations in the run-up to the Supreme People’s Court’s ruling. In August 2026, the Shanghai Bar Association published practical guidelines on the use of AI by lawyers in corporate legal practice.
Three core principles
Die Richtlinien legen drei Kernprinzipien für den Einsatz von KI durch Rechtsanwälte fest: The guidelines set out three core principles for the use of AI by lawyers:
- AI is merely a tool and cannot replace a lawyer’s independent professional judgement (principle of auxiliary use),
- Client information must be strictly anonymised before being entered into AI systems (principle of confidentiality) and
- All content generated by AI must be manually reviewed and validated (principle of due diligence).
Practical implementation in legal practice
The guidelines set out a detailed, eight-step workflow for lawyers that incorporates the use of AI and covers every stage, from defining the task and anonymising information through to drafting prompts, reviewing the results and carrying out manual verification. They also contain sample prompts for common legal tasks such as contract review, legal research, document drafting and analysis of the facts of a case.
The guidelines also address the issues of liability and compliance. They emphasise that, even when using AI tools, lawyers continue to bear professional responsibility for all final work outputs. They also require strict adherence to data protection and confidentiality obligations and stipulate that the unauthorised uploading of sensitive information to public AI platforms is prohibited.
Importance for companies
Although many companies may find it unusual to be guided by the bar’s guidelines, the three core principles of the guidelines – auxiliary function, confidentiality and due diligence – serve as an excellent operational framework for compliance with AI regulations, which any company in China can adopt, regardless of its sector.
Conclusion
The guidelines of the Shanghai Bar Association exemplify how AI can be used responsibly in professional services. The fundamental principles of confidentiality, human oversight and careful review of results are applicable across all sectors and can serve as practical guidance for companies in establishing their own AI governance frameworks.
- Part 1: Overview of the new AI Regulation in China
- Part 3: AI Compliance in the Financial Sector
- Go to the overview page for the series “New AI Regulation in China 2026”