For the last two years, stories about AI hallucinations in court have usually followed the same pattern. A lawyer files a document containing a fabricated case and the opposing counsel or the judge catches it. sanctions and write ups follow.
In that story, the role of judge is typically to catch the slip.
A judgment handed down by the High Court of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh on 6 June 2026 flips that narrative. In Woodland House School v. Malik (CM(M) 191/2026), the fabricated citations were in a judicial order.
What Happened
The underlying dispute is fairly boring and not really relevant to my tale of woe, so I'm not going to mention it.
The juicy part is in a postscript.
The 'losing' counsel argued that the trial court's order relied heavily on precedents that were incompletely or inaccurately cited, without clearly identifying their reasoning or explaining their relevance to the facts.
The High Court then independently verified the authorities cited in the trial court's order. The results will sound familiar to anyone who has come across AI-assisted legal drafting.
Of the two principal authorities relied upon, the first carried both an incorrect citation and a case title that could not be traced. In the court's words, the judgment "does not appear to exist" in the form cited. The second referred to a genuine case, but the citation pointed somewhere else entirely.
What the Court Didn't Say
To be clear: the High Court never found that the trial judge used an AI tool. It couldn't have. There is no duty of care or disclosure requirement for a judgment that reveals how it was drafted.
As AI-assisted drafting becomes the norm, any document containing an unverifiable citations will be assumed to be AI-generated.
Why This Matters
When a lawyer files a hallucinated document, the common law legal system has a corrective mechanism. There is an opposing party motivated to find the error, a judge obliged to rule on it, and a client looking to sue.
When the hallucination appears in a judicial order, those safeguards just aren't present. In Woodland House School, the issue surfaced only because a litigant pressed the point on appeal and a High Court judge personally re-ran the research. This is not a typical or sustainable level of scrutiny.
A hallucinated citation can sit inside an otherwise correct decision, unnoticed for years, causing little practical harm to the result but nonetheless eroding trust in the process.
Is This a One Off?
In this instance, a High Court judge personally re-ran the research. This type of work is not really in their job description.
Verification at Scale
That raises the real question: how will legal systems cope with AI at scale? Most of the discussion around AI in the law has focused on private practice, with far less said about the judiciary. We didn't design our hallucination detection products with judges in mind, but maybe we should look into it.
Woodland House School v. Malik will probably not really go down in history since the judgement was held despite the errors. However, it is a clear signal of the direction of travel. It's only a matter of time before a judge makes up a citation in a way which really damages judicial legitimacy.
AI drafting tools are clearly already in use in judges' chambers as well as in lawyers' offices. Maybe soon we'll just have a legal system decided by Anthropic's model weights. Hopefully not.
If your company, chambers, or legal team is working out how to adapt to AI in the workplace, we'd be glad to show you what real-time verification looks like on your own drafts.