UK court cautions lawyers against submitting fake AI-generated citations, warning of severe disciplinary penalties for misleading legal filings
According to the High Court of England and Wales, lawyers must implement more stringent measures to prevent the misuse of artificial intelligence in their professional activities.
Judge Victoria Sharp stated in a recent ruling that generative AI tools such as ChatGPT are “incapable of conducting reliable legal research” about two recent cases.
Judge Sharp wrote, “Such tools can generate responses to prompts that appear coherent and plausible; however, these responses may ultimately prove entirely inaccurate.” “The responses may make confident assertions that are demonstrably false.”
This does not imply that lawyers are prohibited from utilizing AI in their research; however, she asserted that they must verify the accuracy of such research by consulting authoritative sources before incorporating it into their professional practice.
Judge Sharp suggested that the increasing number of cases in which lawyers (including, on the U.S. side, lawyers representing major AI platforms) have cited what appear to be AI-generated falsehoods necessitates “more to be done to ensure that the guidance is followed and lawyers comply with their duties to the court.”
She also stated that her ruling will be forwarded to professional bodies, including the Bar Council and the Law Society.
Judge Sharp stated that in one of the cases in question, a lawyer representing a man seeking damages against two banks submitted a filing with 45 citations.
However, 18 cases were nonexistent, and many others “did not contain the quotations attributed to them, did not support the propositions for which they were cited, and did not have any relevance to the subject matter of the application.”
On the other, a lawyer representing a man who had been evicted from his London house composed a court filing referencing five cases that did not appear to exist.
The counsel refuted the use of AI, but she acknowledged that the citations may have originated from AI-generated summaries that were displayed in “Google or Safari.” Judge Sharp stated that the court’s decision not to initiate contempt proceedings is “not a precedent.”
“Lawyers who fail to fulfill their professional obligations in this regard are at risk of receiving severe repercussions,” she concluded.
Two lawyers were either referred to professional regulators or referred themselves. Judge Sharp observed that the court’s authority extends from “public admonition” to the imposition of costs, contempt proceedings, or even “referral to the police” when attorneys fail to fulfill their obligations to the court.
