Estonian courts uncover AI-invented sources in legal filings
Estonian legal expert Kärt Pormeister highlights cases where both ordinary citizens and even attorneys submitted AI-generated court documents citing nonexistent studies and court rulings. Estonia's Supreme Court and Tartu Circuit Court have already ruled on such incidents.
Lawyer Kärt Pormeister has written about the risks of artificial intelligence in legal work, drawing on recent cases from Estonian courts. She recounts her own experience using AI to help draft an opinion piece, where the tool produced confident, well-written answers with citations that, upon checking, either didn't exist or didn't support the claims made.
Cases before Estonian courts
Following Midsummer, Estonia's Supreme Court announced a case in which a group of people challenged a logging permit in administrative court, submitting a filing that cited scientific studies on the effects of clear-cutting. The court found that the named Estonian researchers and the studies themselves did not actually exist. The administrative court fined one complainant €150 and nine others €50 each. The complainants argued that using AI isn't prohibited and they had no intention to mislead the court, but both the Circuit Court and the Supreme Court upheld the fines, making them final.
Tallinn Administrative Court's president, Kaupo Kruusvee, explained that administrative proceedings don't require legal expertise from participants, but whoever submits a document remains responsible for its content, regardless of whether it was written with help from a neighbor or an AI tool.
Attorneys not immune
Earlier this year, the Tartu Circuit Court criticized a defense attorney in a criminal case for filing an appeal citing Supreme Court decisions that don't exist, along with several rulings whose actual content had nothing to do with the claims made. The court concluded the text had been generated by AI and never checked. As a result, the attorney's state-funded legal aid compensation was cut from 4.5 hours to just 1.5 hours.
Pormeister stresses that AI can still be a useful tool in legal work, but users must remain source-critical at all times, since AI cannot yet replace human judgment and reasoning.
