• In Anthony Malcolm Cork & Anor v Mark Smith [2026] EWHC 1199 (Ch), an English High Court judge publicly admonished one of the UK's largest law firms after it submitted to the court a fabricated statutory provision, generated by artificial intelligence (AI).
• Cork is not the first matter of this kind. Each successive judgment narrows the space for plausible ignorance: practitioners who fail to verify AI-generated research will be judged not by what they knew, but by what they ought to have known.
• Thinking independently includes cultivating the habit of identifying where AI can genuinely add value and where it cannot. Discernment is itself a form of professional reasoning AI cannot perform on a practitioner’s behalf.

When the judge queried it, the firm sent a second letter, itself largely drafted by AI, seeking to justify the first. Judge Mullen rejected that justification, describing it as a further attempt to mislead the court in uncontested proceedings, where the risk of the court being misled is at its highest. He considered contempt proceedings but declined to pursue them on proportionality grounds. Tellingly, had the firm not already referred itself to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), the English counterpart of South Africa’s Legal Practice Council (LPC), the court would have done so.

The significance of Cork, however, may lie not in its outcome but in the judgment itself. The detail is granular and uncomfortable: the judgment reproduces excerpts...

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