Sanction teardown · First-tier Tribunal, UK · 2025-10-23
Victoria Place Flats RTM Company Ltd & ors v Assethold Limited
What happened
In First-tier Tribunal, UK, a filing relied on an unnamed/unconfirmed AI tool to help draft legal argument. The court identified the following problems with the citations in that filing:
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Fabricated (Case Law)M365 Copilot returned fabricated Court of Appeal citations for Qdime (non-existent EWCA citations) which Mr Gurvits' submissions echoed; tribunal could not locate those citations on bailii and found them to be AI hallucinations.
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Misrepresented (Case Law)Respondent provided an incorrect citation for Gala Unity; tribunal identified the citation as invalid and treated it as an AI-originated error.
Which AI tool
an unnamed/unconfirmed AI tool. Note: Charlotin's public database records tool attribution only where a court order, brief, or reporting on the matter states it explicitly; "unidentified" or "implied" means the record indicates AI use but does not name a specific product — we do not guess.
Outcome
Not specified in source record.
Additional detail
The judge tested Microsoft M365 Copilot and found it produced fabricated Court of Appeal citations for Qdime and an incorrect citation for Gala Unity. The Tribunal concluded Mr Gurvits used AI-generated research without adequate verification; the AI outputs were rejected as unreliable. The Tribunal criticised the conduct but did not impose professional disciplinary sanctions; remedial orders in the case related to service charge and fee reimbursement.
How Citation Safe would have caught this
Citation Safe runs three deterministic layers before a brief is filed: (1) does the citation exist against CourtListener's database of published opinions, (2) if quoted, does that exact language appear in the source, (3) does the cited case actually support the proposition it is cited for. Fabricated case citations fail Layer 1. Fabricated or misattributed quotations fail Layer 2 even when the underlying case is real. Misrepresented holdings — a real case cited for a proposition it does not support — are the target of Layer 3. None of these checks involve asking another language model whether the citation looks right; they are lookups and text-matches against the actual source, which is why a hallucinated citation has to survive a direct lookup against the authoritative source — not another model's opinion — to earn a VERIFIED stamp; our measured false-verify rate is published live at /quality.
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Source: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/documents/1023/Victoria_Place_Flats_UK_23_October_2025.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).