Lawyer struck off after using fake AI-generated cases in his own defence

A first for the tribunal

The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal has struck off a registered foreign lawyer who submitted misleading, AI-generated quotations and case citations while defending himself against disciplinary charges.

Abhishek Kumar, 41, was originally referred to the tribunal after being convicted of knowingly employing an adult disqualified from working by reason of immigration status. The AI charge was added later, after his written defence to the SRA was examined.

The tribunal said either matter would have justified striking off on its own. It is the first time the SDT has had to deal with AI hallucinations.

What actually happened

Mr Kumar became a registered foreign lawyer in 2018 and had been advising a client on immigration matters through a practice called Kim's Law. The client's asylum application was withdrawn in 2019 and a subsequent application for leave to remain was refused, leaving him with no right to live or work in the UK.

When the SRA investigated, the defence submitted in response contained authorities that did not say what he claimed, and in places did not exist.

The pattern is now familiar

Courts in England and Wales have spent two years dealing with variations of this. Fabricated authorities have surfaced in the High Court, in the tribunals and in litigants-in-person filings. Judges have been consistent: the duty to verify is not delegated to software.

What makes this case different is where it happened. This was not a lawyer letting a tool loose on a client matter under deadline pressure. It was a lawyer using generative AI in proceedings about his own professional conduct, before the body that decides whether he continues to practise.

What firms should draw from it

Three things belong on the agenda at your next risk meeting.

Verification must be a documented step, not an assumed one. Every citation produced with AI assistance is checked against the primary source, by a named person, before it leaves the firm.

Second, your AI policy needs to cover regulatory correspondence and internal responses, not just client-facing work. Those documents carry the same honesty obligations.

Third, be clear with staff that a hallucinated authority is treated as a candour issue rather than a technology issue. That is precisely how the tribunal treated it.

Our view

Nobody should read this as an argument against using AI in legal practice. The tools are genuinely useful for drafting, summarising and interrogating large document sets, and firms refusing to engage will lose ground.

But the professional bargain has not changed. A solicitor's signature is a personal warranty that the work has been checked. Outsourcing the drafting is fine. Outsourcing the warranty is career-ending, and the SDT has now said so.