AI on the Bench: Courts Just Lost Control
| Law, Business & Power Correspondent --- A federal judge wrote a ruling.
By Harvey Specter Jr. | Law, Business & Power Correspondent
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A federal judge wrote a ruling. The ruling contained case citations that do not exist. The citations were generated by an AI system the judge or the judge's clerk used without verifying the output. The ruling is now under appellate scrutiny, which means a higher court is going to spend its time — and the parties' money — unpicking a document that should never have left the courtroom in the form it did.
This is not a technology story. This is a professional responsibility story, and the distinction matters enormously if you are a lawyer, a paralegal, a small business owner who hired counsel, or anyone who has ever signed something because a professional told you it was correct.
Let me tell you what the law actually says about this, because knowing what it says is the difference between a complaint that goes nowhere and a motion that gets someone disbarred.
Every jurisdiction that touches European legal practice — and Malta is no exception under its hybrid common law and EU framework — operates on the principle that the professional is responsible for the work product. Not the tool. Not the software. Not the AI. The professional. When a Maltese advocate signs a legal opinion, that signature is a warranty. It means: I have verified this. When that warranty is false, the consequences run from disciplinary proceedings before the Commission for the Administration of Justice all the way to civil liability for negligent misrepresentation. The AI hallucinated the citation. The lawyer authenticated the hallucination. Those are not the same event, but they produce the same liability.
In the American case now drawing appellate attention, the attorney Crawford Appleby put it plainly: "The cure for AI hallucinations is human verification." That sentence is worth reading twice, because it contains the entire legal framework in eleven words. The cure is not a better model. The cure is not a disclaimer at the bottom of the document. The cure is a human being who knows enough to catch the error — which means the human being has to actually know the law, not just know how to prompt a system that claims to know it.
Here is where it gets uncomfortable. Years before I wore a suit to anything, I sat across from a lawyer who handed my family a document full of words we couldn't parse. He used language as a wall, not a window. What I learned that day — and it took years to fully understand — is that the most dangerous legal document is not the one that lies to you. It is the one that confuses you into agreeing with something you would never have agreed to had you understood it. AI-generated legal work, unverified, is that document at industrial scale.
The EU framework that governs this is already in motion. The EU AI Act — the full name is Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 of the European Parliament and of the Council — classifies AI systems used in the administration of justice and in legal proceedings as high-risk systems under Annex III, point 8. High-risk classification under the AI Act does not mean prohibited. It means the system must meet conformity requirements before deployment, must maintain logs, must be subject to human oversight, and — critically — the deployer is liable for harm caused by non-compliance with those obligations. A law firm using an AI drafting tool in Malta without a conformity assessment is not just taking a professional risk. It is potentially in breach of an EU regulation that carries supervisory authority and financial penalties.
The Floridian suing Wynn Las Vegas over Legionnaires' disease is fighting a different kind of institutional negligence — a facility that owed a duty of care and allegedly failed to maintain it. The legal architecture is different but the logic is identical: the institution held a position of trust, the individual relied on that trust, and the institution failed to verify that its systems were safe. Whether the system is a cooling tower or a case research tool, the institution's duty does not transfer to the person who walked in the door.
For small business owners in Malta, this matters right now. If you are using a lawyer who hands you contracts, opinions, or correspondence, you have the right — and I would argue the obligation — to ask one question: was any part of this drafted or researched using AI tools, and if so, how was it verified? That is not an unreasonable question. It is the exact question a sophisticated counterparty's legal team would ask before signing anything. You are entitled to ask it even if nobody expects you to.
The professional responsibility bar associations in Malta, the EU AI Act supervisory structure that will be implemented through the Malta Digital Innovation
