Lawyer Fined for Submitting 48 Fake AI-Generated Legal Citations in Tenerife
A lawyer in Tenerife was fined €420 by the regional superior court for submitting an appeal containing 48 fabricated legal citations generated by an AI tool without verification. The court found the lawyer violated duties of truthfulness and good faith by failing to check the AI output against official legal databases.
What happened
The Tribunal Superior de Justicia de Canarias (TSJC) fined a lawyer €420 for submitting an appeal with 48 false citations to Supreme Court rulings and a Council General of Judicial Power report in a case before the Provincial Court of Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
The lawyer used a generalist AI tool not designed for legal work to generate the citations and did not verify them against any official legal databases or confirm that the sentence numbers, dates, and identifiers actually existed.
Reported impact
The TSJC found that the lawyer's failure to perform human supervision and verification of the AI output violated the duty of truthfulness, rules of good faith, and abused the public justice system.
Index analysis
The court determined that no verification was conducted to check whether the AI-generated references corresponded to real resolutions or reports, and the lawyer did not consult the universal and free Centro de Documentación Judicial database even once to verify any of the citations.
Governance controls
The TSJC has referred the case to the lawyer's professional bar association to determine whether additional disciplinary sanctions are warranted.
Classification
Sources and evidence
Sources not yet published
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