Solicitors under probe after false case citations
Two immigration solicitors in Britain will be investigated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority after a tribunal found that they presented false case citations.
Tahir Mohammed of TMF Immigration Lawyers was responsible for drafting an application for permission to appeal.
The application cited cases that were either non-existent or irrelevant.
Mohammed, who reported himself to the SRA, admitted he had put emails explaining British Home Office decisions into ChatGPT to try to “improve” them.
False or irrelevant
In the second case, Zubair Rasheed of City Law Practice Solicitors and Advocates had signed a claim form in which several of the authorities cited were false or irrelevant.
Rasheed claimed that the grounds for judicial review had been drafted by a part-time trainee who did not verify the references.
Fiona Lindsley, judge of the Upper Tribunal, said in UK v Secretary of State for the Home Department (AI hallucinations; supervision; Hamid) that judges’ time was being wasted by searching for authorities generated by AI and not checked by authorised staff, the England-and-Wales Gazette reports.
The claim form for judicial review has now been amended to require lawyers to sign a statement of truth saying that cited authorities actually exist.
In a judgment concerning solicitors on different cases, handed down in November but published this week, Lindsley said it was no excuse if work had been carried out by junior staff.
Ensuring accuracy
“A solicitor or other legal professional who delegates their work to another fee-earner remains responsible for the supervision of their work and for ensuring its accuracy,” she said.
Lindsley also highlighted the dangers of uploading confidential documents into open-source AI tools such as ChatGPT.
“[Doing so] is to place this information on the internet in the public domain, and thus to breach client confidentiality and waive legal privilege, and any such conduct might itself warrant referral to the regulatory body and should, in any event, be referred to the Information Commissioner’s Office," the judge said.