"The Court also finds troubling [Lawyer's] failure to identify or bring the non-existent case citations to the Court's attention before the hearing on the motion to compel arbitration. The Court should not be left as the last line of defense against citations to fictional cases in briefs filed with the court. While [Lawyer] did not create or rely on the fake citations, he also did not detect them. Instead, he admitted he did not review the cases cited by his opponent...."

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"93. In further submissions, the Representative said 'The suggestion that citing a published authority amounts to providing false material is misconceived. A court decision is a matter of public record. Whether a case applies is a matter of legal argument and opinion, not misrepresentation. It is entirely proper for parties to put forward different interpretations for the Tribunal to consider. To characterise this as "false material" is both unfounded and inappropriate.' It is not clear who the representative is quoting as saying false material was used. The wording used by HMRC was 'inaccurate use of AI/inaccurate authorities'.

As I was catching up on recent international decisions in the developing field of AI and the law, I found myself drawn to two in particular, one from the United States and one from Australia. I initially considered writing about each decision separately. In the end, I felt that reading them together offered a more helpful way of exploring three issues that I have been reflecting on for some time and which I hope will also be of practical interest to readers navigating similar questions.

"I have come to think of AI law as two related, but not necessarily overlapping, things... These are distinct forms of legal work and there is no reason to assume that those practising in one will necessarily practise in the other, but each increasingly calls for lawyers who develop focused expertise rather than treating AI as a peripheral concern."

“The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience… The law embodies the story of a nation’s development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics."

Oliver Wendell Holmes

"...I return to the issue raised by the father’s representatives about the mother’s erroneous citation of authority (see in particular paragraph 54 above). I absolve the mother of any intention to mislead the court. Litigants in person are in a difficult position putting forward legal arguments. It is entirely understandable that they should resort to artificial intelligence for help. Used properly and responsibly, artificial intelligence can be of assistance to litigants and lawyers when preparing cases. But it is not an authoritative or infallible body of legal knowledge. There are a growing number of reports of “hallucinations” infecting legal arguments through the citation of cases for propositions for which they are not authority and, in some instances, the citation of cases that do not exist at all...."