A Western Australian lawyer is now facing a review by the state’s legal regulator after using artificial intelligence to help draft court documents for an immigration case — documents that cited court decisions which didn’t actually exist.
This Federal Court drama unfolded when the immigration minister’s legal team noticed four case citations in the lawyer’s submissions that simply couldn’t be found in any legal database.
The Guardian reported that Justice Arran Gerrard, who presided over the case, referred the unnamed lawyer to the Legal Practice Board of Western Australia and ordered payment of government costs totalling $8,371.30.
The court record, published this week, showed the lawyer explained in an affidavit that he had used Anthropic’s Claude AI for legal research and Microsoft Copilot to cross-check results but admitted to “developed an overconfidence in relying on AI tools and failed to adequately verify the generated results”, with the lawyer’s comments published in several media outlets.
The lawyer told the court, “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.”
He made a full apology to the court and the government’s lawyers for the blunder.
Justice Gerrard stated that 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”.
He also said this wasn’t about the court being against technology, explaining, “the court does not adopt a luddite approach” to AI’s use, but warned that lawyers must “review those cases thoroughly”, not just check if a case actually exists.
“Legal principles are not simply slogans which can be affixed to submissions without context or analysis,” he stated.
This isn’t the first or only time this has happened. Since AI became common in law offices in 2023, there have already been at least 20 incidents in Australia where fake or misleading case citations ended up in court documents thanks to AI-generated hallucinations, according to court summaries and legal research services.
Just recently, a Victorian Supreme Court judge criticised lawyers for filing misleading papers in a murder case; errors included entirely made-up precedents and incorrect quotes, with presiding Justice James Elliott remarking, “It is not acceptable for AI to be used unless the product of that use is independently and thoroughly verified.”
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