Justice

If the lawyer is a victim of 'Ia hallucination' he risks disciplinary sanction

The Tar involved the Order for the breach of the duty of loyalty. Evaluated the centrality of human control over research results

by Giovanni Negri

3 December 2025

AI ethics and legal concepts artificial intelligence law and online technology of legal regulations Controlling artificial intelligence technology is a high risk.

2' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

Key points

The court case
The conscious use of Ia

2' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

Risk disciplinary sanction for the lawyer victim of 'hallucinations by artificial intelligence'. The Lombardy Regional Administrative Court, in fact, with sentence 3348 of 2025, decided to call into question the Milan Bar Association, transmitting a copy of the ruling for the commencement of proceedings against a lawyer who had made extensive use of jurisprudential material completely unrelated to the subject of the case.

The court case

In a 'classic' case brought against the Ministry of Education and a school to contest a rejection determined by five failures reported by a student, the judges of the Fifth Chamber, in addition to rejecting the appeal as unfounded, were divided on the conduct of the defence.

In the appeal, emphasised the administrative magistrates, "all the judgments cited in support of the illegality of the contested measures refer to irrelevant judgments and the maxims indicated in many cases refer to unfamiliar jurisprudential orientations".

This is conduct that constitutes a violation of the defendant's duty to conduct himself in court with loyalty and probity, because, the judgment observes, it introduces elements potentially capable of influencing the adversarial process and the decision phase towards an incorrect course of action and because it unnecessarily burdens the judge's and the opposing parties' activity of checking the jurisprudence evoked and the legal principles affirmed by it only apparently.

In the course of the proceedings, the judgment reconstructs, when asked for clarification, the lawyer defending the student, in a verbalised statement, stated that he had cited elements of case law identified through artificial intelligence-based search tools in the appeal, resulting in incorrect conclusions.

The board of the Lombardy Regional Administrative Court, however, denies exempting value to the lawyer's arguments: the signing of procedural documents, in fact, 'has the function of attributing responsibility for the defensive writings to the subscriber, regardless of whether he drafted them personally or by availing himself of the activity of his collaborators or of artificial intelligence instruments'.

The conscious use of Ia

What is more, the ruling enhances precisely 'The Charter of Principles for a conscious use of artificial intelligence systems in the forensic context', drawn up in 2024 by the Milan Bar Association, which affirms the centrality of the human decision, with the need for the lawyer to proceed to verify and to check of searches carried out with artificial intelligence systems, "a possible source of erroneous results commonly referred to as 'artificial intelligence hallucinations', which occur when such systems invent non-existent results, but apparently consistent with the subject matter".

Hence the decision to forward a copy of the judgment to the Milan Bar Association, availing itself of Article 88 of the Code of Civil Procedure, which binds the parties to the duty of loyalty, with the possibility for the judge to refer the matter to the authorities exercising disciplinary power in the event of transgression.