The case of a British immigration barrister caught using a chatbot to do his work for a tribunal hearing reflects a broader trend of lawyers increasingly relying on artificial intelligence (AI) tools.
Immigration barrister Chowdhury Rahman was found to use ChatGPT-like software to prepare his legal research, which resulted in him citing “entirely fictitious” or “wholly irrelevant” cases, the Guardian reports.
According to upper tribunal judge Mark Blundell, Rahman tried to hide the fact that he used AI and “wasted the tribunal’s time.”
Blundell said Rahman’s paperwork cited 12 authors. However, when the judge came to read the grounds, he noticed that “some of those authorities did not exist” and that others did not support the propositions of law for which they were cited.
This is not the first time a lawyer has faced consequences for using AI, and likely isn’t the last.
Attorney Michael Fourte, defending himself before the New York Supreme Court for using AI citations and quotes, submitted a brief explaining his AI use, which was again written with a chatbot, 404 Media first reported.
“Counsel relied upon unvetted AI – in his telling, via inadequately supervised colleagues – to defend his use of unvetted AI,” Judge Joel Coehn wrote.
In September, California issued a historic $10,000 fine to an attorney who used fake quotations generated by ChatGPT in filing a state court appeal.
And the Utah Court of Appeals sanctioned lawyer Richard Bednar in July for using ChatGPT for a filing in which he referenced a nonexistent court case. Bednar acknowledged “the errors contained in the petition” and apologized.
Nearly all lawyers use AI
Being caught rather than using AI is what makes these cases exceptional.
As many as 97% of lawyers use AI tools for legal work, according to a survey from Legal Benchmark’s AI, a developer of AI legal assistants. Of those, 83% use more than one tool.
The company ran an experiment testing generative AI tools for contract drafting and found that in some cases, these tools outperformed lawyers in producing reliable first drafts.
For example, the top human lawyer produced a reliable first draft 70% of the time, whereas the top AI tool produced a reliable first draft 73.3% of the time.
The Thomson Reuters Future of Professionals Report suggests that 74% of legal professionals use AI for legal research, and 59% use it to draft briefs or memos.
However, Rahman’s and other cases highlight the unreliable nature of these tools. More independent studies are needed to determine whether AI can outperform human lawyers.
One in three would trust an AI lawyer
According to the Thomson Reuters report, the majority (83%) of legal professionals consider using AI to provide legal advice “an inappropriate use case of the technology."
For them, growing AI use is also a matter of revenues and profits. Experts say using AI to increase productivity and cut working hours threatens to disrupt the billable hour business model, which accounts for at least 80% of fee arrangements.
Potential clients are more open to the technology providing them with legal advice. A 2025 survey by legal intelligence platform Robin AI found that nearly one in three (30%) people would allow an AI system acting alone to represent them in a legal matter.
However, they said they would need a 57% discount to choose an AI lawyer over a human.
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