English court names barrister over AI errors
A recorder in a family court in England has ruled that a barrister who presented the court with incorrect information produced by AI searches should be named, according to the England-and-Wales Law Society Gazette.
Recorder Howard, sitting at Bournemouth Family Court, said that Layla Parsons had held herself out as a lawyer offering paid legal work to the public, so it was in the public interest to name her.
It was agreed by all the advocates in A, B, C, D, Re (Extension of assessment; Use of AI: hallucinations) that Parsons had presented a skeleton argument presenting four cases or propositions that were not real.
‘Character assassination’
She accepted that she had used a widely known AI tool to help prepare the skeleton and apologised for inadvertently misleading the court.
The barrister urged the court not to publish either the judgment or her name, saying that this would amount to “character assassination”, which would place her at risk of actual and psychological harm.
According to the Gazette, however, Howard said that the judgment should be published, as it was another example where AI hallucinations had led to the court being misled by a person representing themselves relying on the AI tool without reference to their duty to check the citations.
Court misled
“There is a real and not fanciful possibility that Ms Parsons will in the future offer legal services to members of the public,” he stated.
“I consider that this factor, and the need for any person engaging the services of Ms Parsons in legal proceedings to know that she has misled the court (albeit unintentionally), and does not in my judgment properly understand what she has done wrong, is a strong and overwhelming factor in favour of naming Ms Parsons,” Howard said.
The court heard that Parsons had acted as a lay advocate for her friend, a mother of four who was involved in Children Act proceedings.
In the proceedings, she had sought to support the mother and put herself forward to care for all the children if they could not remain in the mother’s care.
Parsons works as a therapist but also held herself out as a lawyer and is an unregistered barrister who had also done paid legal work as recently as last November.