Artificial intelligence invented fictions instead of legal precedents. The lawyer paid the price
A cautionary case has emerged in the litigation world around artificial intelligence and legal research. A barrister in Australia has been disbarred as head of a legal practice after admitting he used an AI generator to create citations in his documents – without checking whether they actually existed. The citations he submitted to the court turned out to be fictitious.
The incident occurred during the trial, when the judge discovered that many of the citations the lawyer had submitted could not even be traced in legal databases. When questioned, he admitted that the citations had been created by an AI-powered legal research tool and he had made no check on their veracity. That is, the algorithm produced “legal precedents” that never actually existed.
The court reacted swiftly: it ruled that the lawyer had failed in his professional duty to the court and, as part of the disciplinary process, he was disbarred from running his own law firm. He is now only allowed to act as an employed lawyer under the supervision of someone else.
This case is not an isolated one. In other jurisdictions, courts have warned that lawyers who use AI-generated citations in their filings risk contempt of court or even criminal liability. In London, for example, a high-profile court has issued a warning that artificial citations presented as genuine may constitute a breach of duty to the court – in extreme cases, this may qualify as an interference with justice.For the legal profession, this means an immediate rethink on the use of AI tools. Generative AI models are not fallible helpers – they often “hallucinate”, i.e. invent data or sources that are not based on real data. Studies show that such errors occur more frequently in the legal field than one might think. Therefore, attorneys need to use AI only as an assistive tool, but verify each result by hand – especially when it comes to key citations or precedent decisions. Ethics, accountability to the court, and the duty of candor remain cornerstones of the legal profession, no matter how advanced the technology at our disposal.
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