The legal profession in England and Wales has entered uncharted territory. In a stark warning delivered by the High Court in June 2025, senior judges condemned the misuse of artificial intelligence tools by solicitors and barristers who submitted fake legal authorities in court.

The root cause has been the explosion of generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, being used without proper validation. Unlike legal databases, these models do not retrieve verifiable case law. They generate plausible-sounding text based on probability. As the court warned, they “may cite sources that do not exist… [and] purport to quote passages from a genuine source that do not appear in that source.”