A Victorian lawyer has become the first in Australia to face professional sanctions for using artificial intelligence in a court case, being stripped of his ability to practise as a principal lawyer after AI generated false citations that he had failed to verify. Guardian Australia reported in October last year that in a 19 July 2024 hearing, the anonymous solicitor representing a husband in a dispute between a married couple provided the court with a list of prior cases that had been requested by Justice Amanda Humphreys in relation to an enforcement application in the case. When Humphreys returned to her chambers, she said in a ruling that neither herself nor her associates were able to identify the cases in the list. When the matter returned to court the lawyer confirmed that the list had been prepared using legal software that utilised AI. He acknowledged he did not verify the accuracy of the information before submitting it to the court.

The high court has told senior lawyers to take urgent action to prevent the misuse of artificial intelligence after dozens of fake case-law citations were put before the courts that were either completely fictitious or contained made-up passages. Lawyers are increasingly using AI systems to help them build legal arguments, but two cases this year were blighted by made-up case-law citations that were either definitely or suspected to have been generated by AI. In a 89m damages case against the Qatar National Bank, the claimants made 45 case-law citations, 18 of which turned out to be fictitious, with quotes in many of the others also bogus. The claimant admitted using publicly available AI tools and his solicitor accepted he cited the sham authorities. When Haringey Law Centre challenged the London borough of Haringey over its alleged failure to provide its client with temporary accommodation, its lawyer cited phantom case law five times.

With the immense amount of buzz since its release in June, OpenAI's GPT-3 has come a long way of deceiving people -- starting from creating a fake blog to writing opinionated articles along with posting Reddit comments and roasting Elon Musk's tweets. Such advance tasks handled by GPT-3 made people, as well as researchers, realise its immense potential of creating artificial general intelligence. The model not only learned how to code but also to compose music, art, poetry as well as do mathematics -- been applied to many interesting ways. Adding to its accomplishments, GPT-3 has now come up with a short film screenplay -- Solicitors. An approximately 4 minutes short film -- Solicitors -- was written by the GPT-3, which isn't the best screenplay but is even not the worst, considering a machine has written it. The script was initiated by a few lines, written by two of senior student filmmakers from Chapman University, that was fed on to the machine, and the rest of the screenplay has been generated by leveraging the massive language model.

In Solicitors, a new short film made by a pair of senior student filmmakers from Chapman University, the action begins with a woman sitting on a couch, reading a book. She gets up to answer it, finding a sweaty, slightly frenetic young man with wild hair standing on her doorstep. "I'm a Jehova's Witness," he says. "Sorry, I don't talk to solicitors," she responds. The man scrambles, trying to keep her attention.

Allocating repetitive and low-grade work to robots will allow solicitors to focus on more complicated tasks, the profession's regulator claimed yesterday. In a bid to calm nerves over the growing use of artificial intelligence in the legal profession, the Solicitors Regulation Authority said that robots would help lawyers deal with increased competition in the legal services market from non-traditional providers. However, it warned that there were serious ethical issues around the use of artificial intelligence by lawyers. The authority, which regulates 140,000 practising solicitors in England and Wales, said that law firms must "be able to explain the assumptions and reasoning behind some automated decisions". That would not necessarily be easy, it said.

So much of our day-to-day lives has been given over to technology. From how we bank to how we shop, from how we interact with friends and colleagues to how we consume media. As you would imagine the advancements just keep on coming too, and they are having a profound impact on the legal world as well as industry. Artificial intelligence is now being deployed by lawyers across the globe to support the way they provide services to clients. Nowhere else is this marriage of legal expertise and emerging tech more obvious than in the way non-disclosure agreements can now be created using Robot Lawyer LISA.

Better, faster, more productive... these used to be words to describe what we wanted from our internet broadband connection. Now they describe what we expect not only from all our products and services but also from each other. The expectations that we have from the world and the world has from us are dynamic, ever-changing and transforming at speed. AI is all around us. Complicated and repetitive tasks are better performed by computer algorithms and mechanisms than by the human mind.