Spanish Court Fines Lawyer for Submitting AI-Generated Legal Document with 24 Fabricated Citations
Spain's Superior Court of Galicia fined a lawyer 1,800 euros for presenting a court appeal containing 24 false or manipulated legal citations generated by artificial intelligence. The court found the lawyer failed to verify the AI-generated content and violated procedural good faith, while recognizing that AI use in law is not prohibited but requires effective human oversight.
What happened
A lawyer submitted a court appeal of suplication prepared with artificial intelligence that contained 24 false or manipulated legal citations.
The Tribunal Superior de Xustiza de Galicia identified the citations as non-existent resolutions, references unrelated to the case, and text fragments falsely attributed to sentences that were never issued.
Reported impact
The court stated the lawyer's conduct violated elementary deontological duties and showed disrespect to the judicial body. The court found an objective infraction of procedural good faith, and noted the false jurisprudence caused an unnecessary increase in the court's workload.
Index analysis
The court ruled that AI use in legal practice is not prohibited but requires conscious and effective human control over content and must be limited to preparation, study, and analysis tasks, not direct drafting of court documents.
The court concluded that use of such tools requires prior evaluation of the system and, critically, subsequent verification of result accuracy. The court found numerous gross hallucinations due to lack of review.
Governance controls
The court referenced the White Paper on Artificial Intelligence and Law and Instruction 2/2026 of the General Council of the Judicial Power, which establish requirements for human oversight.
The court referred the case to the Bar Association of A Coruña for disciplinary proceedings. The court noted the lawyer admitted the facts, apologized, and informed the client, which were treated as attenuating circumstances, though the lawyer offered no sufficient explanation of how the result occurred or which AI tool was used.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.