AI-generated fake judgments ring warning bells for lawyers

Courts in India and abroad are beginning to confront a troubling pattern: lawyers submitting case law that turns out to be entirely fictitious and generated by artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT.

- TS Tijoriwala

The Supreme Court of India has already dealt with this problem directly. In Gummadi Usha Rani v. Sure Mallikarjuna Rao (2025), the Court discovered that the trial court had relied on four “judgments” that did not exist in any official law report. The Supreme Court made the following scathing observations:

“We take cognisance of the Trial Court deploying AI generated non-existing, fake or synthetic alleged judgments and seek to examine its consequences and accountability as it has a direct bearing on integrity of adjudicatory process. At the outset, we must declare that a decision based on such non-existent and fake alleged judgments is not an error in the decision making. It would be a misconduct and legal consequence shall follow.”