High court tells UK lawyers to stop misuse of AI after fake case-law citations
The high court has told senior lawyers to take urgent action to prevent the misuse of artificial intelligence after dozens of fake case-law citations were put before the courts that were either completely fictitious or contained made-up passages.Lawyers are increasingly using AI systems to help them build legal arguments, but two cases this year were blighted by made-up case-law citations that were either definitely or suspected to have been generated by AI.In a £89m damages case against the Qatar National Bank, the claimants made 45 case-law citations, 18 of which turned out to be fictitious, with quotes in many of the others also bogus.The claimant admitted using publicly available AI tools and his solicitor accepted he cited the sham authorities.When Haringey Law Centre challenged the London borough of Haringey over its alleged failure to provide its client with temporary accommodation, its lawyer cited phantom case law five times.
Suspicions were raised when the solicitor defending the council had to repeatedly query why they could not find any trace of the supposed authorities.It resulted in a legal action for wasted legal costs and a court found the law centre and its lawyer, a pupil barrister, were negligent.The barrister denied using AI in that case but said she may have inadvertently done so while using Google or Safari in preparation for a separate case where she also cited phantom authorities.In that case she said she may have taken account of AI summaries without realising what they were.In a regulatory ruling responding to the cases on Friday, Dame Victoria Sharp, the president of the King’s bench division, said there were “serious implications for the administration of justice and public confidence in the justice system if artificial intelligence is misused” and that lawyers misusing AI could face sanctions, from public admonishment to facing contempt of court proceedings and referral to the police.
She called on the Bar Council and the Law Society to consider steps to curb the problem “as a matter of urgency” and told heads of barristers’ chambers and managing partners of solicitors to ensure all lawyers know their professional and ethical duties if using AI.“Such tools can produce apparently coherent and plausible responses to prompts, but those coherent and plausible responses may turn out to be entirely incorrect,” she wrote.“The responses may make confident assertions that are simply untrue.They may cite sources that do not exist.They may purport to quote passages from a genuine source that do not appear in that source.
”Ian Jeffery, the chief executive of the Law Society of England and Wales, said the ruling “lays bare the dangers of using AI in legal work”.“Artificial intelligence tools are increasingly used to support legal service delivery,” he added.“However, the real risk of incorrect outputs produced by generative AI requires lawyers to check, review and ensure the accuracy of their work.”Sign up to First EditionOur morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what’s happening and why it mattersafter newsletter promotionThe cases are not the first to have been blighted by AI-created hallucinations.In a UK tax tribunal in 2023, an appellant who claimed to have been helped by “a friend in a solicitor’s office” provided nine bogus historical tribunal decisions as supposed precedents.
She admitted it was “possible” she had used ChatGPT, but said it surely made no difference as there must be other cases that made her point.The appellants in a €5.8m (£4.9m) Danish case this year narrowly avoided contempt proceedings when they relied on a made-up ruling that the judge spotted.And a 2023 case in the US district court for the southern district of New York descended into chaos when a lawyer was challenged to produce the seven apparently fictitious cases they had cited.
The simply asked ChatGPT to summarise the cases it had already made up and the result, said the judge was “gibberish” and fined the two lawyers and their firm $5,000.
NatWest apologises to millions of customers locked out of app
NatWest has apologised to millions of customers locked out of its app in the latest IT outage to hit a major UK bank.The high street bank said it was investigating a problem caused by an update to the app that was rolled out late on Thursday, leaving customers unable to access their accounts through the app since shortly after 9am on Friday.It will be disruptive to the more than 10 million customers who use the NatWest banking app to access their account every day.The lender said its other services – including card payments, in-branch, online and telephone banking – were operating as normal.A NatWest spokesperson said: “We are aware that customers are experiencing difficulties accessing the NatWest mobile banking app
Hedge fund orders London-based analysts back to office five days a week
Man Group has ordered its London-based analysts to return temporarily to the office five days a week, as the world’s biggest listed hedge fund seeks to recover from a period of poor performance amid Donald Trump’s tariff war.Quantitative analysts working at Man AHL, the company’s computer-run fund that aims to identify and follow momentum in markets, have been told they are expected to be in its offices daily until the end of July as part of an “all hands on deck” project.The edict applies to about 150 staff in London, just under 10% of the overall group’s 1,700 global employees, the Financial Times reported.“Man AHL has asked its staff in London to work in the office five days a week for a three-month period to support an ‘all hands on deck’ cross-team research project,” the company said. “While these cross-team initiatives are infrequent, experience has shown that a period of highly focused, in-person collaboration allows significant research progress to be made in a relatively short amount of time
UK house prices fall by more than expected amid economic uncertainty
UK house prices suffered a steeper than expected fall last month and the biggest quarterly drop in value in almost a year, as economic uncertainty continued to affect the property market.The average property price fell by 0.4% month on month in May to £296,648, a much steeper fall than the 0.1% decline City economists had expected.Figures published by Halifax on Friday showed that the cost of a typical UK property has fallen in three of the past four months, with the drop in May following a 0
Sports Direct pricing practices ‘may be breaking the law’, Which? says
Sports Direct could be breaking the law by misleading shoppers into thinking they are getting a good deal, a consumer body has claimed, after it looked at prices of items ranging from trainers to hoodies.Which? said it had reported the retailer to the Competition and Markets Authority after uncovering what it claimed were “some questionable and dodgy pricing tactics” on its website.The organisation said it had found products being sold on SportsDirect.com with recommended retail prices (RRPs) “that appear to be misleading”, as its researchers could not find the products sold at that RRP price anywhere else online.It meant people may be being misled “into thinking they are getting a better deal than they really are”
Bonuses banned for 10 English water bosses over sewage pollution
Bonuses for 10 water company executives in England, including the boss of Thames Water, will be banned with immediate effect over serious sewage pollution, as part of new powers brought in by the Labour government.The top executives of six water companies who have overseen the most serious pollution events will not receive performance rewards this year, the environment secretary, Steve Reed, said.The companies – Thames Water, Anglian Water, Southern Water, United Utilities, Wessex Water and Yorkshire Water – are responsible for the most serious category of sewage pollution into rivers and seas, all of which are, or have been, under criminal investigation by the Environment Agency.Under powers in Labour’s Water (Special Measures) Act 2025, the regulator, Ofwat, is now able to ban bonuses for water executives where a company fails to meet key standards on environmental and financial performance, or is convicted of a criminal offence.In the past 10 years, executives at the nine main water and sewerage companies have been paid £112m in bonuses while sewage pollution increased to a record last year of 2,487 events
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