Tenerife lawyer fined for submitting 48 fake AI-generated case citations
The Supreme Court of the Canary Islands (TSJC) has fined a lawyer €420 after he submitted a legal appeal containing 48 fabricated case citations, all generated by a general-purpose artificial intelligence tool (AI).
According to the report, the lawyer included references to non-existent rulings from the courts and even a supposed report from the General Council of the Judiciary, none of which were real. The citations appeared in an appeal against a decision by the Provincial Court of Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
Failure to check any of the references
A document specialist at the TSJC confirmed that none of the 48 citations existed. The court found that the lawyer had not carried out any verification of the AI-generated document, he did not check case numbers, dates, or identifiers, nor did he compare the output against official public records or databases such as CENDOJ, which would have immediately revealed the problem.
“A breach of the basic duty of human supervision”
The TSJC ruled that this failure represented a serious breach of the lawyer’s duty of truthfulness and good faith, as well as an improper use of public judicial services. It also violated the level of diligence required by the Spanish Code of Ethics for legal professionals.
The court set the €420 fine using what it called an “exemplary” criterion, roughly half the annual cost of a specialised legal AI tool. Had the lawyer used such a system instead of a generic chatbot, the court noted, the situation would “likely have been avoided”.
Disciplinary referral and mitigating factors
Beyond the fine, the TSJC has referred the matter to the lawyers’ Bar Association so that it may consider potential disciplinary action.
However, the court also recognised that the lawyer admitted the facts, accepted responsibility, and expressed remorse once the issue was discovered.
In its ruling, the TSJC stressed that human supervision must remain central whenever AI is used in legal practice. AI tools, it warned, should be treated as assistive, not as decision-makers, and blind reliance on them is incompatible with professional obligations.
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