The Criminal Chamber of the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC) has imposed a fine of 420 euros on a lawyer as the author of an action contrary to the duty of truthfulness and the rules of good faith with abuse of the public service of Justice, consummated by introducing up to 48 false jurisprudence citations, generated by Artificial Intelligence, in an appeal.
In addition to the fine, the Court agrees to forward its decision and the background information to the affected person's Bar Association, so that "if appropriate, it may determine the disciplinary responsibilities that may have been incurred."
According to the ruling that imposes the sanction, the lawyer, in the drafting of an appeal to the Criminal Chamber of the TSJC against a ruling by the Provincial Court of Salta Cruz de Tenerife, used a "generalist" Artificial Intelligence tool - that is, not a solution specifically designed for the legal field - to introduce into the reasoning up to 48 citations of rulings by the Supreme Court and a report from the General Council of the Judiciary that supposedly supported his position in the lawsuit and which, in reality, did not exist, as verified by the documentalist of the TSJC.
The Chamber warns that the lawyer did not submit to "any review or verification" that the citations corresponded to real resolutions or reports: "He did not check that the sentence numbers, dates, and identifiers effectively existed," it highlights, and "he did not verify the output data from the AI tool with the jurisprudence databases - notably, that of the Center for Judicial Documentation (Cendoj), of universal and free access - to confirm even one of those references, which would have put him on notice."
In the Tribunal's opinion, this omission "constitutes a breach of the basic duty of human supervision which, as has been explained, is unavoidable when AI tools are used in professional practice and violates the standard of diligence that (...) the Code of Ethics requires of legal professionals". Confessed and contrite The Tribunal resorts to an "exemplary" criterion when quantifying the fine: 420 euros, half the approximate cost of an annual subscription to a specifically legal Artificial Intelligence tool available on the market, "which, had it been used" it emphasizes, "would probably have avoided the regrettable outcome that is now being judged".
The Court imposes as a fine half of the approximate amount of the tool, taking into account that the lawyer, in his response to the Court when it detected the alleged fraud, admitted the facts and expressly acknowledged his responsibility, expressing an "apparently sincere" remorse.
The Chamber emphasizes that it does not "disregard or disdain" the potential that artificial intelligence tools offer for legal professions, but recalls that the principle of human supervision is the "backbone of all professional actions that involve the use of these systems in the field of law, with the professional having to understand the tool as assistive and never as decisive, avoiding blind dependence on the system".
The ruling, whose rapporteur is the president of the TSJC, Juan Luis Lorenzo Bragado, does not shy away from addressing the lawyer's demonstration who, in his allegations, regretted that his identity had been revealed when the case became public and held the Communication Office of the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands responsible for it, which reported on the case with a press release and the sending to the media of the order agreeing to initiate the separate proceeding, anonymizing the resolution with the AI tool approved for this purpose by the General Council of the Judiciary (Kendoj).
According to the lawyer's claim, the anonymized ruling disseminated by the Office of Communication included the NIG (General Identification Number), "which allowed other lawyers and media outlets," he claimed, "by entering that data into the CENDOJ database, to locate the first-instance ruling, in which the names of the lawyers and court representatives involved in the case do appear."
The lawyer placed on record that, because of this, he had been the object of “comments and mockery in different professional environments, including group chats of lawyers of which I am a part”. The Chamber “regrets” that the episode may have unfavorably affected the lawyer's public image, but, it emphasizes, “it sees itself obliged to make clear that the Communication Office did not incur in any reprehensible conduct”, since, it recapitulates, it disseminated the appeal judgment after pseudonymization using the AI-based tool provided by the CGPJ.
Remember the car that “normally the data of professionals is not modified, but in this case their name was also pseudonymized”. The fact that the sentence was indirectly locatable by the NIG, reasons the Court, “does not imply any irregularity on the part of the Communication Office, but rather is a consequence of the structure of the system itself: the NIG is an objective identifier of the procedure and, once entered into the database, leads to the original resolution as it was sent by the judicial body to the Cendoj, in which, according to the rules of official publication of jurisprudence, the names of professionals are not subject to anonymization”.
