Law and justice
Justice system professionals and staff
The problem
An AI-drafted memo cites a higher-court decision with a number, a year and reasoning that look ordinary. Because it is well formed, nobody looks it up; later the decision turns out not to exist, and nobody recorded why it was accepted.
31 courses · 5 specific to this profession
A process from your work
How long does it take you to draft a legal memo or a judgment?
- Step 1The tool searches the sources and writes the first draft from the file.
- Step 2You check every decision, article and quotation at its official source before using it.
- Step 3You record every check on the verification sheet.
- Where the tool goes wrongThe draft cites a unifying High Court decision that does not exist, with a quoted sentence.
- The verification stepFind the decision at the official source and the quoted sentence word for word in it.
More: what was measured and the full check
What changed, as measured
With a legal research tool or a reasoning model, time fell by roughly 20 to 28% on five of six junior lawyer tasks; drafting a confidentiality agreement was the exception.
Who was measured: Law students in their final years at two US law schools, randomised to work with a legal research tool, a reasoning model or neither.
The caveat: Law students, not practising lawyers or judges; with these tools invented authorities were rare, but they did occur.
The check, step by step
- Look up every High Court decision the draft cites, by number and date, in the lists published on gjykataelarte.gov.al and on QBZ, where decisions unifying or changing judicial practice are published in the Official Journal (Article 485(2) of the Code of Civil Procedure).
- Open the full text of the decision and find the quoted sentence word for word in the rule of law the court formulated. If the decision cannot be found or the sentence is not there, remove the reference and the quotation from the draft.
- Do not use the AI tool to confirm that the decision exists or that the quotation is accurate. Do the confirming only at the official source, not in a summary or on a third-party page.
- In the note for the judge, put next to each authority the link where you verified it. Check authorities taken from the parties' filings the same way before they go into the draft, and clearly mark any you cannot find as not found.
In the course you review and draft legal documents with AI, with a protocol for checking citations, acts and articles.
We can help you with this process: “Justice AI: Document review and drafting”, 8 hours.
A documented failure pattern
Unifying decision no. 3 of 15.10.2021 does not exist
A paragraph from the draft reasoning of a civil judgment on a disputed debt, which the legal assistant of a first-instance court drafts with an AI tool for the judge hearing the case.
Source: Courts and Tribunals Judiciary, 2025, and 3 more.
Why it is easy to miss
If the judge signs, the court's decision cites a unifying decision nobody can find, as happened in the US state of Georgia, where the appellate court vacated a trial court order that relied on two cases that do not exist. The tool did not find the decision in any register: it produced it as a plausible continuation of the text, with the right body, the "no., date" format the High Court's own lists use, a plausible year and a sentence in quotation marks that sounds like the rule of law a court formulates. The sentence says exactly what the reasoning needs, so it reads as confirmation, and a unifying decision is an authority people rarely question: anyone who checks only whether the rule "sounds right" lets it through without opening it. Whether the rule itself is correct is a separate question: the problem is that it rests on a decision that does not exist.
Where the failure pattern is documented: Guidance for judges and court staff (Courts and Tribunals Judiciary of England and Wales, October 2025; CEPEJ of the Council of Europe, December 2025), a court decision (Court of Appeals of Georgia, USA, June 2025) and a database of court decisions on AI-fabricated material (September 2026).Sources: Courts and Tribunals Judiciary, 2025; European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice, 2025; Court of Appeals of the State of Georgia, First Division, 2025; AI Hallucination Cases Database, 2026.The case above is ours, written for work in Albania; the laws it names were checked against the official text.
What it looks like
The AI tool's draft (reasoning)This approach is consistent with unifying decision no. 3 of 15.10.2021 of the Joint Colleges of the High Court, according to which "electronic messages between the parties, where not contested, are sufficient evidence of the existence of the obligation".
The check in the official sourcesHigh Court website, the lists "Unifying decisions by year", "Joint Colleges decisions" and "Decisions on unifying or changing judicial practice": no decision no. 3 of 15.10.2021. QBZ, High Court decisions of October 2021: dated 8 and 13 October only.
Translated from the Albanian original.
Specialist courses for this profession
Courses on documents, translation, evidence and verification in justice work. Legal decisions remain human.
Justice AI: Orientation
Justice AI: Document review and drafting
Justice AI: Translation and terminology
Justice AI: Data and evidence
Justice AI: Preparation for assessment
What you leave with
The citation verification sheet records, for every decision the memo cites, the official source searched, what was found, who confirmed it and when. It is completed before the memo reaches the judge or prosecutor, and a higher instance can reopen the same sources.
Justice system professionals and staff
The catalogue lists all 31 together, with filters for format and time.