TL;DR
Lord Pentland, the Lord President and Scotland’s most senior judge, has said that AI-generated submissions citing invented cases and legislation that does not exist have already reached Scottish courts. In his speech marking the start of Scotland’s legal year, given in Edinburgh on Monday 28 September, he said contempt proceedings were not far off.
What the Lord President said
Pentland’s sharpest words were for wasted time. “Neither the court nor other parties appreciate their time being wasted with the citation of hallucinated court cases, the assertion of belief as fact or reference to legislation which does not exist,” he said. “All of these have happened in our courts and the bar for contempt of court is perilously close to being met.”
According to a spokesman for Scotland’s Judicial Office, his focus was people representing themselves, whose AI-assisted submissions have been getting longer and sometimes wrong, which it called a noticeable recent trend. He also asked lawyers to take particular care.
On the bench’s own use, Pentland was clear that generative AI assistants would support judicial work, not replace it, and that “decision-making rightly remains solely the work of judges”. Judges are expected to understand a tool’s risks and benefits before using it, with training to follow. His overall advice to the profession was “tempered enthusiasm”: Scottish lawyers must keep adopting technology to compete, but critically.
A problem on both sides of the border
The warning echoes England and Wales. Back in June 2025, England’s High Court dealt with two cases built partly on fake authorities. In one, a judicial review, five of the authorities cited did not exist. In the other, a claimant relied on 45 authorities and 18 turned out to be fictitious. The King’s Bench Division’s president, Dame Victoria Sharp, said lawyers who misused AI risked being sanctioned, referred to their regulator or held in contempt.
On Monday, former lord chancellor Sir Robert Buckland argued that costs orders could curb ‘AI slop’ from litigants. Pentland’s speech points the same way from the bench: the burden of checking falls on everyone else in the room.
The speech came amid wider strain. Pentland said High Court indictments had grown from under 100 a month in 2024 to over 150 now, and the Crown expects more than 200 a month this legal year.
Looking forward
For Scottish firms and in-house teams, the practical message is that AI-drafted research needs the same verification as a trainee’s first draft. With contempt now openly discussed, a first Scottish sanction for a hallucinated citation is no longer a theoretical risk.