"lawyers comply with their duties to the court.”
The High Court of England and Wales has warned lawyers to take stronger steps to prevent the misuse of artificial intelligence in legal work.
In a ruling tying together two recent cases, Judge Victoria Sharp said generative AI tools like ChatGPT “are not capable of conducting reliable legal research”.
She added: “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.”
Her judgment stressed that lawyers still have the option to use AI in research.
However, they have a duty “to check the accuracy of such research by reference to authoritative sources, before using it in the course of their professional work”.
Judge Sharp said the court is seeing a growing number of cases in which lawyers have cited false material likely produced by AI systems.
That includes lawyers representing both clients and AI platforms.
She said: “More needs to be done to ensure that the guidance is followed and lawyers comply with their duties to the court.”
Her ruling will now be sent to professional legal bodies, including the Bar Council and the Law Society.
The warning follows two cases where court submissions included citations for legal cases that did not exist or had been inaccurately quoted.
In one, a lawyer representing a man pursuing damages against two banks submitted a filing with 45 case references.
Judge Sharp said 18 of those did not exist, and others “did 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”.
In the second case, a lawyer acting for a man evicted from his London home submitted a document with five fictional case citations.
The lawyer denied using AI directly but said the sources may have come from AI-generated summaries seen via “Google or Safari”.
The court did not initiate contempt proceedings but warned against drawing the wrong conclusion from that decision.
Judge Sharp stated: “Lawyers who do not comply with their professional obligations in this respect risk severe sanction.”
Both lawyers were referred or referred themselves to regulators. The court also reminded legal professionals of the range of sanctions available.
These include public admonition, financial penalties, contempt of court, and even referral to police.
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