I've been thinking about where legal nurse consulting is headed.

And I don't think the biggest change is going to be AI.

I think AI is only one part of a much larger shift.

The medical record is no longer simply a record of what clinicians did.

Increasingly, it is the product of people, workflows, algorithms, decision-support rules, EHR configuration, interfaces, health information exchange, alerts, automation, and clinical judgment.

And here's the part I think the LNC profession needs to pay much more attention to:

Clinicians are already delegating portions of clinical decision-making to these systems.

Not because clinicians are incapable of making decisions.

Because modern healthcare is too complex to function without technology helping determine what information gets surfaced, what gets flagged, what orders get suggested, what protocols get activated, and what actions get placed into a clinician's workflow.

That changes what it means to investigate a medical record.

And I think the LNC of the near future is going to need to understand the technology behind the record almost as well as they understand the clinical events documented within it.

Most consultants using AI right now are asking the wrong question. They're asking "does this save me time?" The question that actually matters is: "can I defend this under cross-examination?"

Those are not the same question, and the gap between them is about to get a lot more expensive.

What's actually changing

In June 2025, the Advisory Committee on Evidence Rules approved a new Federal Rule of Evidence — Rule 707 — aimed specifically at machine-generated evidence. The rule is short, and it says exactly what it means: when machine-generated output would be subject to Rule 702 if a human expert had said it instead, the court can only admit it if it independently satisfies Rule 702's reliability requirements. It went through public comment ending in February 2026 and is still moving through the rulemaking process — it isn't binding law yet, but it tells you exactly where federal evidentiary standards are headed, and several courts are already reasoning this way ahead of formal adoption.

There's a companion amendment to Rule 901 on authentication. If AI-generated evidence gets challenged, the burden shifts to whoever's offering it to prove it's more likely than not authentic before it comes in at all.

Translation: the era of "the AI said so" quietly riding into a case unexamined is ending. If it hasn't ended in your jurisdiction yet, it's coming.