Ontario law society suspends lawyer for using AI generated material in hearing

Osgoode Hall in Toronto in home to the Law Society of Ontario. Photo by Peter J. Thompson/National Post/File

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Ontario’s legal regulator has suspended a lawyer for six months after a judge busted her in open court for using AI hallucinated material in a hearing about family and estate law.

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The decision by the discipline tribunal of the Law Society of Ontario marks the first time a Canadian law society has gone beyond a reprimand to actually suspend a lawyer’s licence for abusing artificial intelligence in court submissions, according to Tom Macintosh Zheng, a Toronto lawyer who tracks the issue.

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It is a growing problem that remains as murky and controversial in the lawyer discipline context as it is in more substantial matters of what AI misuse does to their cases.

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The tribunal ordered Mary Hyun-Sook Lee, who does business as Jisuh Lee, to comply with a set of remedial guidelines while her licence is suspended, and to pay costs of $10,000. It found she committed professional misconduct when she “failed to serve her client by relying upon a factum containing only non-existent or irrelevant case law generated by an artificial intelligence tool,” and that she “deliberately misled a court” about it.

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The suspension follows an awkward scene in Ontario Superior Court last year when Lee, appearing before Judge Fred Myers to argue a motion from her own factum in a case about a dead man’s estate, provided a mess of what Judge Myers correctly identified as AI hallucinated precedents and farcical misreadings of real cases.

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When the judge asked to see a copy of these cases, Lee was unable to give him one from her papers, so the judge looked them up online himself, sometimes finding they did not seem to exist in any legal database, or were irrelevant, or did not show what Lee argued. Lee’s factum, for example, cited a case as a precedent for when a court removed an estate trustee. “In fact, the opposite is true. The court did not remove the estate trustees,” Judge Myers wrote, after reading it.

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The judge asked her bluntly if this was an AI job. According to the judge’s written reasons that ordered Lee to explain herself or be held in contempt, she replied that her office “does not usually do so but that she would have to check with her clerk.”

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“It should go without saying that it is the lawyer’s duty to read cases before submitting them to a court as precedential authorities. At its barest minimum, it is the lawyer’s duty not to submit case authorities that do not exist or that stand for the opposite of the lawyer’s submission,” the judge wrote.

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That matter of civil contempt remains outstanding, with an amicus curiae, an independent lawyer that can advise the court, appointed “due to procedural uncertainty associated principally with Ms. Lee’s failure to retain counsel,” according to a recent ruling.

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