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A Melbourne law firm was caught using citations in court documents that were fabricated by generative artificial intelligence.
Massar Briggs Law was ordered by the Federal Court of Australia to personally pay costs for submitting a native title summary document that contained citations that were either incorrect or did not exist.
A junior solicitor submitted that she used Google Scholar’s search tool, which she regularly used during university and previously had no problem with. The solicitor apologised to the court for her error.
Justice Bernard Murphy said the capacity of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to “fabricate” or “hallucinate” information – particularly with citations – “is now widely appreciated”.
“Whilst the use of AI in the legal profession is growing, practitioners must be aware of its limitations,” Justice Murphy said.
“Any use of AI must be consistent with the overriding duty of legal practitioners as officers of the court and their fundamental obligation to uphold, promote and facilitate the administration of justice.”
First Nations Legal and Research Services (FNLRS) was tasked with producing the footnoted documents via extensive searches of its own database and then in publicly available databases.
Jason Briggs, principal solicitor of Massar Briggs Law, said team members would collaborate to check the junior’s work, but he was not aware that anyone had done so in this instance.
The solicitor accepted it was an error on his part to allow the collaborative work to be performed remotely at the junior’s home, and described the failure to check as an “oversight error”. Briggs also expressed his regret and inconvenience to the court.
Justice Murphy said the junior’s use of AI gave rise to cost, inconvenience and delay to the parties, and has also “compromised the effectiveness of the administration of justice”.
However, he did not consider it severe enough to refer the junior solicitor to the Victorian Legal Services Board.
“The junior solicitor took insufficient care in using Google Scholar as the source of document citations in court documents, and in failing to check the citations against the physical and electronic copies of the cited documents that were held at Massar Briggs Law’s office.
“The error was centrally one of failing to check and verify the output of a search tool, which was contributed to by the inexperience of the junior solicitor and the failure of Briggs to have systems in place to ensure that her work was appropriately supervised and checked,” Justice Murphy said.
Justice Murphy published the reasons to censure those errors.
The case: Murray on behalf of the Wamba Wemba Native Title Claim Group v State of Victoria [2025] FCA 731
Naomi Neilson is a senior journalist with a focus on court reporting for Lawyers Weekly.
You can email Naomi at:
