Article by Manny Wood published in the Coffs Coast News Of The Area on 15 August 2025.
Robert is not happy with the result that he obtains in the Supreme Court, where he claimed an interest in real estate after the failure of a joint endeavour with a friend. His application was dismissed and he was ordered to pay the whole of the legal costs involved.
Robert cannot afford legal representation and after conducting “deep research” through a popular Artificial Intelligence (‘AI”) platform, he decides to appeal the Judge’s findings.
The Court of Appeal, consists of a hearing before three Judges, who made a number of observations regarding Robert’s reliance on AI at the hearing.
The Court notes that a prior judgement that Robert refers to “had absolutely nothing to do with the legal issues in dispute” and another cited case “was wholly out of place and inappropriate to any factual or legal issues in dispute” and yet another, “had nothing remotely to do with the issues”.
One of the Judges was particularly concerned about how “Generative AI produce apparently credible citations to non-existent cases and somehow provides paragraph references to such cases” and further observed that “such tools can produce apparently coherent and plausible responses to prompts, but those coherent and plausible responses may turn out to be entirely incorrect” creating a “dilemma” when used by a person without legal training or otherwise “not familiar with or unable to discern both the relevance and accuracy of what Generative AI may produce”.
Additional concerns identified how the use of AI may introduce added cost and complexity to the proceedings and, where unverified, add to the burden of other parties and the Court in responding to it.
In dismissing the appeal, the Court states how the present case “illustrates the need for judicial vigilance in the use of AI, especially but not only by unrepresented litigants”.
Robert was also ordered to pay the other party’s substantial legal costs in defending his ill-fated appeal.
Generative AI was not used in the writing of this column.
Email Manny Wood, Principal Solicitor and Accredited Specialist in Wills and Estates at TB Law at manny@tblaw.net.au or call him on (02) 66 487 487.
This fictional column is not legal advice.
