Pinsent Masons has self-referred itself to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) after lawyers at the firm made inaccurate submissions to a court relating to their citation of AI-hallucinated legal authorities.
Insolvency and Companies Court Judge Mullen wrote in a ruling on Friday (22 May) that letters he received, drafted by a junior solicitor at Pinsents with the help of AI, caused him ‘to be concerned that a cavalier attitude was being taken as to the accuracy of material that Pinsent Masons were putting before the court.’
The matter, heard in the Business and Property Courts of England and Wales, concerned a request for a block transfer order by Pinsents in an insolvency case.
While such applications are ‘almost invariably determined without a hearing,’ Mullen wrote, he listed the case after receiving a letter dated 30 March that made reference to an insolvency rule of which he was not aware. He examined the statute and found that it said ‘nothing of the sort.’
He wrote back to Samantha Poulton, the senior associate on the case, asking for clarification. Mullen was ‘astonished’ by the reply, which tried to justify the initial letter by claiming the wording was ‘a summary conclusion’ – an explanation he said ‘was impossible to accept.’
Transcripts provided to the court and included in the ruling revealed that the junior associate, referred to only as ‘Lawyer A’, relied heavily on AI in the drafting of both letters.
On multiple occasions, the AI explicitly told Lawyer A that it could not be sure of the accuracy of the answers it produced and advised Lawyer A to check the outputs against the official wording.
‘I am not able to verify the precise wording of the current version of the rule from a primary source here,’ the AI wrote to Lawyer A. ‘Given that this is the central plank of your argument to the Court, I would strongly recommend that you: 1.**Verify the wording directly** against the current version of the Insolvency (England and Wales) Rules 2016.’
The partner on the matter was Steven Cottee, a restructuring lawyer who has been a partner at the firm since joining in 2012. Neither he nor Poulton checked the rule themselves. ‘In his evidence he says he took the Purported Text at face value and did not check it. He accepts he should have done so,’ Mullen wrote. ‘He was not, however, aware that AI had been used in the preparation of the letter.’
Poulton told the court she was aware that Lawyer A used AI ‘from time to time, but [that] she was unaware that AI was being used in relation to this application.’
Mullen wrote of the junior associate: ‘There is nothing to suggest that [they] checked any of the references generated by the AI and LA seems to have almost entirely outsourced the thinking process to the program.’ The transcripts of Lawyer A’s conversation with the AI run to 59 pages.
Mullen considered whether it would have been appropriate to bring contempt of court proceedings against Lawyer A before deciding that the submissions were the results of ‘a serious lack of care and of judgment’ rather than ‘a want of honesty.’
The SRA will ‘form its own view’ on whether the lawyers on the case breached the code of conduct and, if so, on what the ‘appropriate sanction’ would be, the ruling stated.
A spokesperson for Pinsent Masons said: ‘We have apologised unreservedly to the Court and are taking steps to strengthen our processes and oversight to ensure this does not happen again. As the matter has been before the Court, it would not be appropriate to comment further.’
An SRA spokesperson said: ‘We are aware of the report that Pinsent Masons have made, and we are looking into it before deciding on any next steps.’
Friday’s ruling came almost exactly a month after Sullivan & Cromwell had to apologise to a New York judge after the firm noted more than 21 inaccuracies in a motion filed with the court, at least some of which were attributed to hallucinations.
In summary, Judge Mullen wrote: ‘AI has the potential to be wholly unreliable. AI may of course provide a jumping off point for research and legal reasoning but it does not, at least at present, do away with the need for proper research and thought on the part of a legal professional, even a very junior legal professional.’
