Image: — © AFP Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV
BBC News has reported on several incidents and developments regarding lawyers using artificial intelligence (AI) in court, highlighting both the risks of fabricated information and the potential for efficiency.
For example, in 2025, a UK high court was forced to warn lawyers after “phantom” case law was cited in housing disputes, with one lawyer using fake law as a defence.
Again, in March 2026, a Scottish sheriff issued a warning after a company used AI to prepare its case, leading to “reckless reliance” on non-existent legislation and cases, which wasted valuable court time.
While AI tools are being explored in the justice system to speed up transcription and summarize judgments, many would argue that human oversight remains crucial to check for “hallucinations” (false AI output).
The legal technology startup firm BrentWorks Inc. has a solution for a growing problem for attorneys. This is in the form of the company’s verification tool, CiteSentinel. This platform is designed specifically to catch AI-hallucinations in legal citations. By flagging case law and statutes that may not exist, Dea Shandera-HunterCiteSentinel helps attorneys avoid sanctions, reputational damage, and courtroom embarrassment.
The tool scans legal documents and flags case law, statutes, and legal authorities that may be fabricated, misstated, or otherwise erroneous, before they reach a judge.
Through this type of technology, legal practitioners are able to:
· Their own AI-assisted drafts, before filing
· Submissions from co-counsel, contract attorneys, and support staff
· Opposing counsel’s filings, for strategic advantage
· Any document where citation accuracy carries professional or ethical weight
Conceptually, CiteSentinel raises a question for legal firms to ponder: Can you be certain that every associate and paralegal under your supervision is not using AI?
Courts around the world are increasingly sanctioning attorneys who submit briefs containing invented case citations, a well-documented byproduct of generative AI drafting tools that produce authoritative-sounding, but entirely fictional, legal authority. CiteSentinel was designed to close that verification gap, giving attorneys a fast and easy way to confirm that every citation in a filing corresponds to a real case, a real statute, and a real legal authority.
Today, a lawyer’s supervisory obligation includes a question that would have seemed absurd just a few short years ago: Are the cases cited in this brief real or imaginary?
Many attorneys who do not personally use AI to draft documents are discovering they have a problem anyway. Opposing counsel may have used AI. Co-counsel may have. Contract attorneys and paralegals almost certainly have access to it and may be using it
without disclosing that fact. When a brief containing fabricated citations reaches the court, the question of who drafted it quickly becomes secondary to the question of whose name is on it.