The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal in England and Wales, which describes itself in this judgment as "a Statutory Tribunal established by the Solicitors Act 1974," decided case number 12884-2026 in a judgment dated August 25, 2026. It ordered a registered foreign lawyer struck off the Register of Foreign Lawyers. Part of the case was about work prepared with generative AI, and the judgment's executive summary says this "was the first time that a lawyer's use of artificial intelligence or large language models in legal proceedings had been litigated before the Tribunal." The judgment's first lines say the decision "is subject to appeal to the High Court (Administrative Court)" by the lawyer, and that the order "remains in force pending the High Court's decision on the appeal." Parts of the judgment follow, not the whole.
How the AI Allegations Arose
The case did not begin with AI. The regulator, the Solicitors Regulation Authority, brought proceedings in January 2026 on a separate allegation, following a criminal conviction of 2024, and the tribunal found that allegation proved too. The AI allegations arose while the lawyer was defending those proceedings.
On March 12, 2026 he filed a written Answer that cited a number of authorities in his support. On April 8 the regulator's counsel reviewed it and identified "incorrect citations and citations which did not reflect the legal propositions outlined." The regulator drew this to his attention the same day and pointed him to a 2025 High Court judgment, which the tribunal's judgment calls "the leading judgment" on the actual or suspected use by lawyers of generative AI tools to produce written legal arguments that are not then checked. His reply of April 9, "which purported to correct the errors, was itself drafted using generative AI and contained further false material." On April 13 he accepted that the reply had also been produced with AI and contained inaccuracies.
The judgment describes several of the authorities in the Answer. One was a real case given a reference from 2020, where the case is from 2015 and did not bear that citation. Another was a real case whose citation "related to an unrelated intellectual property case." A third was a real case cited for propositions that "do not chime with the reasoning in the case." Dishonesty was not alleged.
None of these errors announced itself. A citation to a real case looks like a citation. They were found when the regulator's counsel reviewed the Answer.
What the Tribunal Found
On the lawyer's admissions, the tribunal found the allegations proved under three of the SRA Principles 2019 and the duty in the SRA's Code of Conduct not to mislead the court, and proved in part under the Code's duty to make only submissions that are properly arguable. The executive summary records that "Allegation 2.1 was proved; Allegation 2.2 was proved in respect of the citing of non-existent cases and incorrect legal propositions," and that "Typographical errors in case citations were not sufficiently serious to amount to misconduct." It determined that there was "no distinction in principle" whether the material a lawyer relied on was sent to a regulator, a disciplinary tribunal or a court.
"The issue was ultimately about a lawyer's duty in litigation and to the court," the judgment says. "Whilst AI was, in this case, the medium through which the material was produced, it was not necessary for the erroneous material to have been generated by or with AI." The same issue, it says, "might arise using common search engines or if work was produced by another person for which the respondent solicitor had ultimate responsibility."
On the tribunal's reasoning, the point reaches past AI. For a lawyer under these rules, the duty rests with the one who puts the material forward, whoever or whatever produced it.
The Sanction
On sanction, the tribunal judged the lawyer's culpability on the AI allegations "very high." "A lawyer is always responsible for the accuracy of his or her output," the judgment says. And then: "Mistakes happen. Not every mistake will be a matter serious enough to engage the Regulator or this Tribunal."
The tribunal found that he "had embarked on the use of AI without giving any proper thought to the consequences of so doing," and that he had failed to take proper steps to ensure his work was accurate or "to satisfy himself that the electronic tools he was seeking to use were reliable." His culpability was very high "because it was repeated after errors had been pointed out and explained," and the tribunal gave "very substantial weight to the repeated nature" of the misconduct.
On harm, the tribunal found it high. Acting for himself and not for a client "reduced the actual harm caused," it says, but it rejected the submission that this was a mitigating factor, because he was "seeking to be the direct beneficiary of his own misconduct." It also found that, case by case, there may be a difference in harm and culpability between citing cases or propositions that did not exist and "providing incorrect citations, as occurred here."
The tribunal said the strike-off was "the same sanction it would have imposed if either allegation had appeared before the Tribunal without the other." It made no order as to costs. The order remains in force pending the High Court's decision on the appeal.
Sources
- Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (England and Wales). Judgment in Case No. 12884-2026, Solicitors Regulation Authority Ltd v a Registered Foreign Lawyer. 25 August 2026. court