A lawyer submitted a legal factum containing AI-generated fake case citations and misrepresented real cases to a Canadian court, leading the judge to order a contempt proceeding.
In Ko v. Li, a family law case in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, lawyer Jisuh Lee of ML Lawyers submitted a factum dated April 25, 2025 that contained multiple fabricated legal citations. The factum cited cases including 'Alam v. Shah' and 'DaCosta v. DaCosta' that either did not exist or linked to completely unrelated cases. When the judge clicked the hyperlinks, one directed to an unrelated commercial real estate case and another led to a 404 error page. Additionally, Lee misrepresented the holding in 'Johnson v. Lanka', claiming the court removed estate trustees when in fact the opposite occurred - the court refused to remove them and penalized the moving party with costs. When questioned during oral submissions, Lee stated her office does not usually use AI but would need to check with her clerk. She was unable to provide correct citations or copies of the cases. Judge Myers determined that approximately 9 of 27 legal citations in the 10-page brief were incorrect, with some cases being completely non-existent. The judge found this appeared to be AI-generated content that had not been verified before submission, violating fundamental duties to the court. As a result, Judge Myers ordered Lee to show cause why she should not be cited for contempt of court.
Domain classification, causal taxonomy, severity scores, and national security assessments were LLM-classified and may contain errors.
AI systems that fail to perform reliably or effectively under varying conditions, exposing them to errors and failures that can have significant consequences, especially in critical applications or areas that require moral reasoning.
Human
Due to a decision or action made by humans
Unintentional
Due to an unexpected outcome from pursuing a goal
Post-deployment
Occurring after the AI model has been trained and deployed