In South Africa some law practitioners have gotten into trouble for using AI to do law research for them and then citing case law that turned out to be an AI hallucination.
What would be the consequences of citing case law that does not exist? Could it lead to disbarment?
What the censure is, is up to the judge.
It could be as mild as a ticking off, it could be a fine, or ultimately it could be a referral to the relevant licensing authority to be disciplined. Disbarment would probably only be appropriate for repeated violations, although as this happens more and more, and as knowledge of the risks of AI get rolled out into more and more education for lawyers, the tolerance for this kind of malpractice is likely to go down.
Oh, and the client probably insists on a deep discount to their bill - if you have the balls to issue one.
South Africa is not unique and you can get a long list of examples from all common law jurisdictions just by googling the subject.
This is clearly misconduct (even if it happened only because of merely negligent use of the AI) and it would almost always give rise to some punishment as well as serious harm to the lawyer's reputation. But it is rarely considered so serious that the attorney is disbarred without additional seriously aggravating circumstances.
Usually, in the U.S., when this happens, the attorney is sanctioned by the judge or judges presiding over the case, typically with a compensatory damage award in an amount representing the attorney fees incurred by the other parties dealing with the error, and sometimes with an additional fine, typically on the order of $1,000 to $20,000 reflecting the burden that this conduct placed on the courts.
When (as is usually the case for a represented party) the error is clearly the lawyer's and does not involve the client, usually only the attorneys are sanctioned, and the client is not held responsible for the sanction award.
Usually the sanction is awarded as a frivolous litigation penalty, either under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11 or an equivalent state court rule, or under a separate state or federal statute such as 28 U.S.C. § 1927. But it could also be punished as a form of contempt of court.
In a comment to another answer, Naftali Tzvi notes that in the case of Byoplanet Int'l, LLC v. Johansson (S.D. Fla. July 15, 2025), an attorney was ordered to "attach a copy of this order" to any case he filed within the district for the next two years.
In a recent case in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado (a federal trial court) in which I was an attorney for another party, a party who did this was sanctioned in the amount of attorneys' fees incurred by our firm to deal with it (although this was just the icing on the cake, as the opposing party also admitted in open court during the trial to perjury, and to inducing several other witnesses that he called to engage in perjury to back up his testimony, and both he and his attorney were sanctioned for this as well).
Also, of course, the attorney is likely to lose whatever legal argument the non-existent case was advanced to support. The client would usually be bound in the case by their attorney's conduct (at least in a civil case, the situation is more complicated in a criminal case where a client has a constitutional right to effective assistance of counsel). If the argument was otherwise winnable with real cases, this would likely be a clear case of legal malpractice, giving rise to liability to the client for any economic harm resulting from this malpractice.
Often, the attorneys involved with feel compelled to withdraw from the case because their credibility before the judge in the case had been undermined, and this loss of credibility, while intangible, could be long lasting and persist into future cases involving different parties and different judges who were familiar with the incident.
This would also be a matter that would constitute a professional ethics violation for the attorney, but, unless the conduct was repeated on many distinct occasions, the mostly likely sanctions would be a public or private reprimand from the attorney regulation body in a U.S. state, an agreement to attend ethics school classes, or perhaps a brief suspension from practice. A suspension from practice, however, would be likely if the attorney in question had previously been found to have committed one or more prior ethics violations. Only in the most exceptional, culpable, and persistent cases would this result in disbarment (e.g. if this was done in a dozen cases after prior discipline and suspensions, or if it was pivotal in a case that resulted in a serious criminal penalty or a massive loss of money or deportation where a credible asylum claim had been made by the client).
The usual public or private reprimand (sometimes called a public or private censure) in and of itself it a slap on the wrist, but it goes on the attorney's "permanent record" and would be considered if the attorney committed a new ethic violation in the future, or if the attorney sought to be admitted to practice in a new jurisdiction.
Non-judicially, it would also be common for the law firm in question to be fired by their client from representing that client in any matters going forward, and to feel compelled, at a minimum, to refund the fees billed for the deficient work, and sometimes, for the entire case if the error resulted in the client losing the case (even if it might have been a challenge for the client to win no matter what).
Furthermore, these cases frequently receive a great deal of national and even international publicity, which would permanently damage the reputation of the lawyer in question.
In almost every case, moreover, the lawyer who used the AI that hallucinated the case or cases would have no legal grounds to sue the AI firm whose AI provided the hallucinated advice, because a reasonable lawyer would not rely upon an AI produced case without double checking its validity personally.
One reason that the penalties for this kind of ethical misconduct (i.e. refusing to confirm that the cases cited real exist and really say what they are alleged to say) is punished as severely as it is, is because the fact that the attorney engaged in misconduct is so patently clear and really has no other reasonable explanation. Indeed, attorneys who try to deny that they did anything seriously wrong are often punished even more severely for trying to mislead the court by trying to cover up their wrongdoing, than they would have been if they had frankly confessed to their errors and their culpability for those errors, in the first place.
In contrast, many kinds of misconduct that are objectively more serious, that do more harm, and that are more culpable, are often punished less severely, only after much more prolonged proceedings, or not at all, because proving that what happened really took place and was not actually just misunderstood, is much more difficult.
Possible consequences, depending on circumstances and intent:
Source:
On 6 June 2025, the Divisional Court handed down judgment in R (Ayinde) v. London Borough of Haringay [2025] EWHC 1383 (Admin).
This related to two cases referred to Divisional Court because of the actual or suspected use by lawyers of generative artificial intelligence tools with the consequence that false information was put before the courts.
In the judgment, among other things the President of the King's Bench listed the sanctions available to the courts I outlined above.
Of the lawyers involved in the two cases referred to the court:
An appendix to the judgment discusses some other cases.
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