{"id":95589,"date":"2025-06-08T04:46:44","date_gmt":"2025-06-08T04:46:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/2025\/06\/08\/lawyers-could-face-severe-penalties-for-fake-ai-generated-citations-uk-court-warns\/"},"modified":"2025-06-08T04:46:44","modified_gmt":"2025-06-08T04:46:44","slug":"lawyers-could-face-severe-penalties-for-fake-ai-generated-citations-uk-court-warns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/2025\/06\/08\/lawyers-could-face-severe-penalties-for-fake-ai-generated-citations-uk-court-warns\/","title":{"rendered":"Lawyers could face \u2018severe\u2019 penalties for fake AI-generated citations, UK court warns"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p id=\"speakable-summary\" class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The High Court of England and Wales says lawyers need to take stronger steps to prevent the misuse of artificial intelligence in their work.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In <a rel=\"nofollow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.judiciary.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Ayinde-v-London-Borough-of-Haringey-and-Al-Haroun-v-Qatar-National-Bank.pdf\">a ruling<\/a> tying together two recent cases, Judge Victoria Sharp wrote that generative AI tools like ChatGPT \u201care not capable of conducting reliable legal research.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cSuch tools can produce apparently coherent and plausible responses to prompts, but those coherent and plausible responses may turn out to be entirely incorrect,\u201d Judge Sharp wrote. \u201cThe responses may make confident assertions that are simply untrue.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That doesn\u2019t mean lawyers cannot use AI in their research, but she said they have a professional duty \u201cto check the accuracy of such research by reference to authoritative sources, before using it in the course of their professional work.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Judge Sharp suggested that the growing number of cases where lawyers (including, on the U.S. side, <a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2025\/05\/15\/anthropics-lawyer-was-forced-to-apologize-after-claude-hallucinated-a-legal-citation\/\">lawyers representing major AI platforms<\/a>) have cited what appear to be AI-generated falsehoods suggests that \u201cmore needs to be done to ensure that the guidance is followed and lawyers comply with their duties to the court,\u201d and she said her ruling will be forwarded to professional bodies including the Bar Council and the Law Society.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In one of the cases in question, a lawyer representing a man seeking damages against two banks submitted a filing with 45 citations \u2014 18 of those cases did not exist, while many others \u201cdid not contain the quotations that were 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,\u201d Judge Sharp said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the other, a lawyer representing a man who had been evicted from his London home wrote a court filing citing five cases that did not appear to exist. (The lawyer denied using AI, though she said the citations may have come from AI-generated summaries that appeared in \u201cGoogle or Safari.\u201d) Judge Sharp said that while the court decided not to initiate contempt proceedings, that is \u201cnot a precedent.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cLawyers who do not comply with their professional obligations in this respect risk severe sanction,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Both lawyers were either referred or referred themselves to professional regulators. Judge Sharp noted that when lawyers do not meet their duties to the court, the court\u2019s powers range from \u201cpublic admonition\u201d to the imposition of costs, contempt proceedings, or even \u201creferral to the police.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2025\/06\/07\/lawyers-could-face-severe-penalties-for-fake-ai-generated-citations-uk-court-warns\/\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The High Court of England and Wales says lawyers need to take stronger steps to prevent the misuse of artificial intelligence in their work. In<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":95590,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[178],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tech"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95589\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/95590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}