Whenever we catch lawyers in the U.S. turning in court filings filled with fake cases that ChatGPT spit out, they earn a healthy round of public ridicule and, at worst, some fines. The Department of Justice tried to consign people to an El Salvadoran slave camp based on a fake Supreme Court quote and folks barely even noticed. The British legal system apparently isn’t as easy going, with a panel of U.K. judges suggesting a lawyer might face life in prison for submitting AI-fabricated case law in a civil action.
If that seems harsh, just remember how these people deal with divorce actions:
It’s hardcore, man. We can’t even agree to keep people in prison for trying to hang Mike Pence and the U.K. is already looking at disappearing Edward V for using Claude to write the summary judgment motion.
To be clear, the judges in the instant matter didn’t order junior barristers locked up in the Tower. They didn’t even explicitly mention life imprisonment, but they did categorize fake cases as, in some cases, rising to the level of “perverting the course of justice.” The maximum penalty for that specific charge? Life. In. Prison.
It’s the corollary to the American “obstruction of justice,” which has a maximum penalty of ZERO as long as you’re the president of the United States at the time.
In this case, “a 90 million pound ($120 million) lawsuit over an alleged breach of a financing agreement involving the Qatar National Bank,” according to the Associated Press, the filing managed to cite a whopping 18 fake cases. The client informed the court that the mistake was his fault and not his solicitor’s.
Yeah… except lawyers are supposed to check that stuff. Even if the client is a lawyer — like when former Trump fixer Michael Cohen fed his attorneys some AI hallucinations they then filed — the first rule of lawyering is that the client is always (potentially) wrong. The whole point of hiring representation is to make sure the personally aggrieved client isn’t going off half-cocked.
No one is going to jail over this one, making the opinion more akin to a U.K. professional responsibility version of Scared Straight. Fake cases in a $120 million civil dispute are not going to fool anyone for long. Opposing counsel will sniff those out quickly, so anyone larding up on fake cases in a banking dispute is either doing so unintentionally or guilty by reason of insanity. The most draconian of punishments are intended for the unscrupulous actor trying to deliberately mislead.
And that’s the miscarriage of justice that’s coming — if it hasn’t already arrived. Somewhere out there, there’s a tenant representing themselves because attorneys cost too much and Legal Aid had its budget slashed to appease Elon Musk, and that poor soul is getting buried under a tsunami of fake precedent that they’ll never be able to look up and the overworked judge will just rubberstamp. It happens.
Worse, we’re going to hear the stories of the unsophisticated party trying to keep their head above water with ChatGPT and not the deeper-pocketed bully who can make up cases. Because we’ll catch the former and the latter might skate for a years if the overwhelmed justice system doesn’t catch it.
Maybe the U.S. could use a little more professional fear before that happens.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.