This has probably been a week of encountering rather sad cases for me.
As though AI skepticism in legal research is not high enough, the recent High Court case dated 22/05/2026 of Cork v Mark Smith (in the Matter of an Office-Holder) [2026] EWHC 1199 (Ch) turned what would otherwise be a routine administrative application – a “daily diet of electronic boxwork” – for Judge Mullen into a needed expression of concern towards the conduct of a firm, its partner, senior associate and junior associate in their use of AI in communicating with a court.
No serious harm was done to the client’s case fortunately, but serious harm was done to the appearance of professionality of the solicitor profession.
Reading through the judgment makes me as someone in the legal profession feel a sense of second hand embarrassment.
Just an uncontentious application
The relevant facts of the application need only be discussed in brief. It was an application seeking a block transfer order. Judge Mullen helpfully described what a block transfer order is at paragraph [6]:
The court has power to remove an insolvency practitioner from office as a trustee in bankruptcy, liquidator, administrator, or supervisor of an individual or company voluntary arrangement and appoint another person in their stead. There are occasions where such an office-holder will wish to be removed, for example where he or she is to retire or to move to a different firm. Such insolvency practitioners will often hold different types of appointment in respect of a number of individuals and companies and will wish to be removed as office-holder in respect of all of them. The Insolvency (England and Wales) Rules 2016 (“IR 2016”) provide for a procedure by which such an office-holder can be removed from office in respect of all such appointments by making a single application. This is known as a “block transfer application”.
In addition, the lawyer/law firm must then provide the requested information to the banks to verify the identity of the beneficiaries of the foreign remittance, even when the law/law firm’s intentions are genuine and there is no foul play. From one perspective, the requirement of the Rules and Rulings of the Bar Council and its harmonious interpretation and support of the banking regulations issued by Bank Negara is a joint effort to maintain the trustworthiness of the legal profession alongside the trustworthiness of Malaysia’s financial institutions.
The relevant actors here will be referred to as the firm, the partner, the senior associate and the junior associate. Though the first three were named in the judgment and can be discovered by the public, there is no use naming them for the purposes of this article that seeks to be a general cautionary tale.
The Quandaries of AI
At paragraph [33], the judge’s reaction was one that would be shared by most the first time they realized the output of AI in legal drafting:
What is remarkable when reading those chats is, first, that one would think that the text attributed to the AI was produced by an intelligent human being. The second remarkable thing is that, on a large number of occasions, it is plainly wrong or, at the very least, extremely misleading.
Indeed, AI can save us immense amounts of time in legal work, allowing us to focus on the more meaningful tasks. It is a powerful tool. However, as the overcited adage from the first Spiderman goes “with great power comes great responsibility”.
In this case, the AI wrongly described and quoted what Rule 12.37(5) of the Insolvency (England and Wales) Rules 2016 were. It hallucinated. But that was not the main issue. The junior associate relied on this hallucinated Rule 12.37(5) in their first letter to court on 30/03/2026. Naturally, the court was confused and sent back an email on 14/04/2026 stating that they could not find the quoted Rule 12.37(5). This is because it was not there.
Things only got worse. When the junior associate wrote a letter in response to this court’s email on the same day, their defence was that they intended Rule 12.37(5) as a paraphrase. But the judge viewed their dirty laundry, the trail of questions with the AI, and realized that the junior associate was using that as a cover up. For example, the junior associate simply removed the quotation marks (‘’). The problem remained though because Rule 12.37(5) was entirely misattributed.
It gets worse
Judge Mullen, seeing such a cavalier response, took the matter into his own hands now, and more seriously. The judge ordered witness statements from the ones responsible for writing the letter to explain why this discrepancy occurred. The judge had suspected already at that point that generative AI was used. The judge identified several problems after reading the witness statements and the question trail on the AI Chat:
- The junior associate conduct was an obvious problem.
- Yet this mistake was not caught by the senior associate and partner who checked the letter. This is especially damning when the senior associate had done such applications before and knew that the legal position when applying for block transfer applications of liquidators did not have a clear and express rule.
- Then there was the fact that the AI had repeatedly warned the junior associate that it cannot read the exact English statute. All the junior associate had to do was to upload or copy and paste the exact statute from a publicly accessible website such as legislation.gov.uk to provide the AI with the exact wording of the statute. But due to some oversight the junior associate did not do so.
- Indeed, the AI chat trail suggested that the junior associate had not even bothered to verify the exact wording of the statute with a reputable legal database.
- The junior associate also had hid the use of AI from the senior associate and the partner.
I am glad however that Judge Mullen mentioned how AI flagged its own deficiencies, showing that in this instance at least it was more cautious of the standards that the legal profession demands than the junior associate. Speaking from personal experience, the AI can analyze statutes pretty well provided it is uploaded clearly and legibly, something I hope lawyers take advantage more of but not at the expense of doing their own thinking.
The Firm’s Protection of the Junior Associate
It is respectable that the junior associate who wrote the letter using AI and sent it was not named to the court nor in the firm’s reference of themselves to the Solicitors’ Regulatory Authority (SRA) (see paragraphs [28] and [31]). The reason given by the firm for this was owing to its “duties to its employee”, a vague but implicit way of saying they do not want to place the blame on someone recently admitted to the Rolls, damaging their career and potentially destroying their reputation before it began.
The judge was someone sympathetic to the junior associate as seen in paragraph [38]:
It is concerning that LA appears to have asked the AI what these sections said, rather than reading an authoritative online resource or book, and does not appear to have checked the AI’s response. Had LA done so, it would have been readily apparent that the AI was producing nonsense and was unreliable. It perhaps betrays a misguided faith in the AI on LA’s part…
However, the junior associate’s situation got even worse when the judge continued;
I cannot understand why LA did not heed the AI’s later warnings about the need to check the provisions to which it referred.
The warning was as follows (paragraph [39]):
However, I want to be candid with you — I am not fully confident that I am reproducing the exact statutory wording of Rule 12.37(5) with complete precision. The substance of the provision is as I have described in our earlier discussion, but for a submission to the court you should verify the exact wording against the current version of the Insolvency (England and Wales) Rules 2016 as published on legislation.gov.uk before relying on it. The last thing you want is to cite a provision to the court with inaccurate wording.
And as the judge fairly noted, “Despite this express warning, LA does not appear to have checked the text. If they had done so the error would have been spotted.”
The Failed Supervision
Senior Associates are busy and often entrust juniors on the more mundane things. This is far from wrong morally or by any standard, but unfortunately liability attaches to the senior. This is especially so when the senior could recall from previous case experience what the accurate position of the law was and that this was not it. Paragraph [42] describes the Senior Associate’s conduct damningly (at paragraph [42]):
…[The Senior Associate] says in her witness statement that she herself had checked the IA 1986 on a previous occasion when the court had not granted release to liquidators and had been unable to find an express power. She thought LA had found something that she had not and that this was plausible given that she had experience of the court granting release in these circumstances on other occasions. She did not check the rule herself.
Things get even more disappointing as we progress. The partner did not perform the proper checks. The fact that the partner did not check was compounded by the fact that the Senior Associate relied on the partner checking. She only gave a “cursory” review assuming that the partner’s check was more thorough (see paragraph [45]).
There were repeated warnings by the AI that it did not have the accurate text. At a point it was citing its own hallucinated text. The junior associate’s failure to spot this looked worse and worse.
The worst culminated in this message coupled by the judges response, which I will not comment on as I believe it speaks volumes.
[AI RESPONSE]:
“**Our Recommendation** Given that this is a letter to the Court and the rule is the sole basis of your argument, Option 1 is strongly preferable. Presenting a paraphrase as a direct quote — even inadvertently — could undermine the credibility of the submission if the Court checks the wording and finds it does not match precisely. It is worth taking the few minutes to verify the text on legislation.gov.uk before filing.
Would you like me to redraft the letter on the basis that the quote will be inserted once verified?”
There was no answer to that from LA. Despite the repeated warnings, including the warning that the court would check the wording, and the encouraging words from the AI that checking would only take a few minutes, this does not seem to have been done. Had that check been carried out, the error would have been obvious.
Airing the Dirty Laundry
In cases like this, the text history with the AI agent becomes your dirty laundry. The judge is now airing that out for the world to see. This also reminds lawyers to think about the trail of questions posed to AI, or better yet avoid relying on a hallucinated answer in the first place.
This is especially where the junior associate damned themselves when the AI drafted an apology for them to the court but the junior associate rejected this with a “I don’t think we should apologise – no”. The court ominously commented “This in itself raises questions about LA’s judgment” (at paragraph [54]).
The Judge’s Balanced Temper
In short, the reprimand could be worse. At points the judge was willing to give AI credit when disagreeing with its prompter. For example, at paragraph [61], the judge noted that:
The phrase ‘which provides as follows’ does present what followed as the text of the rule, even if it was not placed in inverted commas. That is precisely what the Court has taken issue with and the response needs to address that frankly.
Of course, to those of us who use AI regularly, we know that the AI does not reprimand the prompter harshly.
The judge also considered that in light of not receiving the junior associates’ witness statement as the firm decided not to provide it, therefore (at paragraph [69]):
…I do not know the extent to which LA might take issue with what is said about the production of the letters or whether there is further context LA would wish to add. I am not making any final findings of fact in respect of any of the lawyers here. Nonetheless, in large measure the AI chat transcripts and messages between [The Senior Associate] and LA speak for themselves and, in order to explain why I intend to take the course that I intend to take, I must set out the facts as they appear from the evidence that I have.
At the very least, the judge considered that the junior associate may have their own side of the story.
The judge at paragraph [79] also could empathize “on a human level” with the embarrassment of this event for the partner, senior associate and their firm.
When [The Senior Associate] and [the Partner] were alerted to the seriousness of the situation by my order and written reasons, however, they have provided frank and, it seems to me, truthful accounts of what happened. On a human level I should say that I have no doubt that those statements were difficult to write and I am sure that [the Senior Associate’s] expression of mortification is genuine. It seems to me that they have, in providing those statements, behaved entirely properly and in accordance with their duties as solicitors. [The] firm have also been full and frank in providing the transcripts of the AI chat.
The judge also noted the minimal effect on the client at paragraph [80]:
…The applicants are now represented by another firm and they have obtained the substance of the order they sought. There has been some delay and additional cost occasioned by that. [The firm], I have been told, has agreed to pay the additional costs incurred by its former clients as a result of the creation and sending of these letters. There has been only a modest effect on the overall conduct of the case…
Most importantly, the court did not hold the partner and senior associate in contempt of court. As seen in paragraph [82],
Mere negligence as to the falsity of the material is not sufficient to justify contempt of court proceedings. In those circumstances I consider that the referral to the SRA, which has happened on the firm’s own initiative, is an appropriate response.
Also, even though the junior associate was not named, the judge considered their mistake to be due to “lack of proper thought and care, rather than a want of honesty” and found contempt proceedings to be “disproportionate” (paragraphs [88]-[89]).
The judge was also cognizant not to waste court’s time since the harm was “limited”, paragraph [89]:
…In view of the limited harm done in the case, LA’s inexperience, and the availability of referral to the SRA in the case of these professionals, it seems to me that it is unnecessary to devote further court time to that question. Similarly, I will not waste further court time inviting LA’s representations as to whether they should be named in this judgment.
In short…
As the judge concluded,
[The Senior Associate and the Partner] are experienced solicitors undertaking technical work in a reputable firm, no doubt under considerable pressure at times. I have no doubt that LA was working under pressure too. None of that excuses a failure to check the accuracy of the material that was placed before the court.
