THE BRIEF THAT NEVER EXISTED — When Lawyers Stop Practicing Law and Start Submitting Fiction from Machines

In a case now shaking legal circles in the United Kingdom, a British immigration barrister was found to have submitted case citations to a tribunal that were either irrelevant, misrepresented, or simply never existed. The culprit wasn’t carelessness or lack of experience — it was generative AI.

The barrister, Chowdhury Rahman, used an AI tool to draft arguments for an immigration appeal. The tribunal judge, Mark Blundell, identified serious irregularities in the paperwork: twelve legal authorities were cited, but several could not be located in any official database. Others were completely unrelated to the legal arguments they were allegedly meant to support. Rahman attempted to hide the fact that he had used an AI chatbot to generate the material, which the judge stated had “wasted the tribunal’s time.”

It was not the first time generative AI tools have introduced fiction into the legal system.

In the United States, an attorney in New York made headlines after submitting a legal brief in federal court citing multiple case decisions that did not exist. The lawyer had used ChatGPT to assist in writing the document, and when pressed by the court, admitted to not verifying the outputs. The court imposed formal sanctions, stating the conduct reflected a failure of basic due diligence.

In California, a state appeals court imposed a $10,000 fine on an attorney for submitting legal filings that contained nearly two dozen false quotations, all of which were traced back to ChatGPT. The court ruling emphasized that attorneys are responsible for verifying every citation and cannot rely on tools that “fabricate legal authority.”

These are not isolated cases of AI misuse. They’re part of an accelerating pattern where generative tools — designed to predict language, not verify truth — are being quietly integrated into professional workflows without oversight or validation.

What makes these cases exceptional is not that lawyers used AI, but that they were caught.

Most attorneys today already use AI tools in some form — for drafting contracts, conducting legal research, or summarizing discovery material. Industry surveys and research reports confirm that legal professionals across the U.S. and U.K. are adopting AI at rapid speed, particularly in large firms and tech-forward practices. But few jurisdictions have clear rules governing what tools may be used — or what professional standards apply when the output is wrong.

The problem isn’t the technology. The problem is the illusion of credibility. Generative AI tools present citations in the same format as real legal decisions. They speak with certainty, mimic tone, and offer persuasive structure — but with no underlying guarantee that what’s being cited was ever published, decided, or even heard in a courtroom. Without human verification, they become engines of confident misinformation — and the legal system, built on precedent and fact, cannot withstand fiction disguised as jurisprudence.

The ethics risk is compounded by economics. Some legal experts have warned that law firms may be tempted to quietly offload drafting work to AI systems to reduce labor hours — especially under the billable hour model. The more AI can simulate the appearance of expertise, the more tempting it becomes to present its output as vetted work. But the cost of doing so — as seen in these recent disciplinary cases — includes fines, reputational damage, and professional misconduct referrals.

Public trust in AI’s legal potential is growing faster than institutional readiness. Recent consumer polls suggest that a significant portion of people would consider being represented by an AI system under certain conditions — particularly if the cost savings are substantial. But the legal profession remains largely aligned: offering legal advice or submitting filings using unverified AI output is widely seen as unacceptable.

These disciplinary cases are not about banning AI from the courtroom — they are about reinforcing the non-negotiable responsibility of the legal profession: to ensure that every word submitted to a court is real, accurate, and accountable.

AI does not — and cannot — take the oath.
But the lawyer who signs their name to it still must.

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