UK Lawyers Could Face Penalties for Misusing AI

In a June 6 ruling, the High Court of England and Wales declared that lawyers who misuse AI could be held in contempt of court and even face criminal penalties. This comes after two high-profile cases where lawyers submitted filings containing AI-generated citations in written arguments.

Judge Victoria Sharp wrote in her ruling that generative AI tools “are not capable of conducting reliable legal research,” and therefore lawyers using them in a professional setting have the responsibility to “check the accuracy of such research by reference to authoritative sources, before using it in the course of their professional work.”

“Such tools can produce apparently coherent and plausible responses to prompts, but those coherent and plausible responses may turn out to be entirely incorrect,” wrote Sharp. “The responses may make confident assertions that are simply untrue.”

One of the cases mentioned by Judge Sharp was that of a man suing the Qatar National Bank for £89 million in damages (roughly $120 million USD).

The plaintiff’s lawyer submitted a filing with 45 citations to other cases, out of which 18 didn’t exist, and several 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,” according to Sharp.

The other involved a lawyer representing a man who had been evicted from his home in London. In her filing, the lawyer cited five cases that did not exist, though the lawyer denied having used AI.

While Sharp didn’t express complete opposition to the use of AI as a research tool, she underlined that lawyers have a professional duty to check the accuracy of such research.

UK authorities have previously issued guidance for the use of AI tools by lawyers, but Sharp added that “guidance on its own is insufficient to address the misuse of artificial intelligence.”

The ruling comes as generative AI tools become progressively more integrated into various industries and professions. Recently, Wikipedia announced it would start using AI in the editing process.