A lawyer has been referred to Western Australia’s legal regulator after using artificial intelligence in preparing court documents for an immigration case. The documents contained AI-generated case citations for cases that did not exist.
It is one of more than 20 cases so far in Australia in which AI use has resulted in fake citations or other errors in court submissions, with warnings from judges across the country to be wary of using the technology in the legal profession.
In a federal court judgment published this week, the anonymised lawyer was referred to the Legal Practice Board of Western Australia for consideration and ordered to pay the federal government’s costs of $8,371.30 after submissions to an immigration case were found by the representative for the immigration minister to include four case citations that did not exist.
Justice Arran Gerrard said the incident “demonstrates the inherent dangers associated with practitioners solely relying on the use of artificial intelligence in the preparation of court documents and the way in which that interacts with a practitioner’s duty to the court”.
The lawyer told the court in an affidavit that he had relied on Anthropic’s Claude AI “as a research tool to identify potentially relevant authorities and to improve my legal arguments and position”, and then used Microsoft Copilot to validate the submissions.
The lawyer said he had “developed an overconfidence in relying on AI tools and failed to adequately verify the generated results”.
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“I had an incorrect assumption that content generated by AI tools would be inherently reliable, which led me to neglect independently verifying all citations through established legal databases,” the lawyer said in the affidavit.
The lawyer unreservedly apologised to the court and the minister’s solicitors for the errors.
Gerrard said the court “does not adopt a luddite approach” to the use of generative AI, and understood why the complexity of migration law might make using an AI tool attractive. But he warned there was now a “concerning number” of cases where AI had led to citation of fictitious cases.
Gerrard said it risked “a good case to be undermined by rank incompetence” and the prevalence of such cases “significantly wastes the time and resources of opposing parties and the court”. He said it also risked damage to the legal profession.
Gerrard said the lawyer did “not fully comprehend what was required of him” and it was not sufficient to merely check that the cases cited were not fake, but to review those cases thoroughly.
“Legal principles are not simply slogans which can be affixed to submissions without context or analysis.”
There have been at least 20 cases of AI hallucinations reported in Australian courts since generative AI tools exploded in popularity in 2023.
Last week, a Victorian supreme court judge criticised lawyers acting for a boy accused of murder for filing…
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