“…rightly in my view, and I make no criticism of her. For what it is worth, I suspect, that, in common with many unrepresented parties, [Claimant] has resorted to research using the internet and has come up with false leads. The late Muir Hunter was an eminent member of the insolvency bar and the author for many years of an insolvency commentary that still bears his name. It is easy to see how his name could have come up in the course of an internet search and end up wrongly linked to a real case name and reference. The abbreviation BPIR stands for the Bankruptcy and Personal Insolvency Reports. They are not readily available to members of the public. It would have been difficult for [Claimant] to check the citation…”

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Ad/Marketing Communication This legal article/report forms part of my ongoing legal commentary…

Ad/Marketing Communication This legal article/report forms part of my ongoing legal commentary…

“F accepts using ChatGPT in his statements. There is no prohibition upon a party from doing so. The risks of doing so are clear from R (Ayinde) v. London Borough of Hackney and Ors [2025] EWHC 1383 (Admin), a case in which the High Court was considering the citation of fake cases by regulated lawyers, Dame Victoria Sharp P said: "Freely available generative artificial intelligence tools, trained on a large language model such as ChatGPT are not capable of conducting reliable legal research. Such tools can produce apparently coherent and plausible responses to prompts, but those coherent and plausible responses may turn out to be entirely incorrect. The responses may make confident assertions that are simply untrue. They may cite sources that do not exist. They may purport to quote passages from a genuine source that do not appear in that source".

For my part, I consider the full replacement of lawyers to be both unlikely and undesirable. What does seem inevitable is a profound transformation in the way legal practice and the administration of justice are carried out. High-volume and routine tasks such as research and document review may be largely automated. Yet the heart of legal work, i.e. advocacy, ethics, client care, and the ability to connect with human issues, is not easily replicated by machines. These elements remain bound up with human judgment, empathy, and persuasion, and I expect them to continue to be led by people rather than algorithms.

“I have used AI in the production of this decision… This decision has my name at the end. I am the decision-maker, and I am responsible for this material. The judgment applied - in the sense of the evaluative faculty, weighing-up the arguments, and framing the terms of the order - has been entirely mine.”