Real case, fake quotation: why checking that a case exists is no longer enough

Three ways a citation fails

The decisions read for this article, from 2024 to 2026, show each kind of failure; the note counts them by kind.⁵ The three are different problems, and the difference decides what a check has to do.

The case does not exist

This is the failure the profession knows, and our article on technological competence sets out what courts and law societies have done about it. Three decisions mark it here. In Zhang v Chen, the Supreme Court of British Columbia held that "Citing fake cases in court filings and other materials handed up to the court is an abuse of process and is tantamount to making a false statement to the court."¹⁰ In Reddy v Saroya, the respondent's factum in the Court of Appeal of Alberta pointed out that seven of the appellant's cases "could not be found, including six that were purportedly decided by this Court"; the Court later ordered $17,550 plus GST in costs payable by the appellant's lead counsel personally.¹¹ A citation can fail this way even where a case of the name cited exists. In an Ontario bankruptcy, the registrar found that a case cited by name and neutral citation did not exist at that citation, although decisions bearing that name did.¹² In June 2026, Ontario's Law Society Tribunal cited a published count, made as of March 27, 2026, of "cases reported on CanLII where a court or tribunal has identified that a party has submitted a fictitious citation": "seven in 2024, 86 in 2025, and 39 in the first quarter of 2026, totalling 132".¹³ As the Tribunal describes it, that is a count of fictitious citations; the description does not extend to invented quotations from real cases, or to real cases cited for what they do not hold.

The case exists, the quotation does not

In Kapahi Real Estate Inc v Elite Real Estate Club of Toronto Inc, counsel for the respondents had delivered a reply factum on a motion to vary. The judge found that it "cited real cases with correct neutral citations to CanLII. But then counsel added quotations from the cases. The quotations do not exist in the cases. The quotations are fake."¹ Seven paragraphs of the factum contained them.² They were not slips in transcribing real passages: "Rather, they are completely made up. Nothing like them appears in the precedents from which they are said to be quoted."¹⁴ One was presented as written "for the majority" of the Supreme Court of Canada in Sattva Capital Corp v Creston Moly Corp, a unanimous decision, and of it the judge wrote: "Nothing like this quotation appears in the case. It is wholly made up."¹⁵ Two named the wrong judge as the author of the decision quoted; the first sentence of one was "similar to the first sentence of para. 33 of the decision", and the rest was invented.¹⁶

This article reads Kapahi as a case about fake quotations, whatever their source. Counsel told the court that he "did not use or rely on artificial intelligence or other such tools" and that the errors arose from "my misreading of the cases cited".¹⁷ The judge thought AI the most obvious explanation but was "not making that finding". The judge then described what might have happened: counsel "might have checked each case cited to ensure that it was a real case but failed to read the cases to look for the quotations that AI hallucinated."¹⁸ The sentence is put hypothetically. It also describes the check this article is about: one that confirms each case is real, and stops there. Later in the reasons the judge put the choice plainly: counsel had either "used AI and has been untruthful about it", or "made up seven fake paragraphs and chose to present them as actual quotations from precedent cases".¹⁹

The outcome was a referral, not a sanction. With "the unclear facts here", the judge declined to refer a contempt proceeding to the Attorney General, noted that an earlier proceeding had already exposed counsel to some risk of costs for misconduct that included the fake quotations, observed that bodies "like the Toronto Police Service and the Law Society of Ontario" are equipped to investigate, left it to them to determine "if there has been either use of AI hallucinations or deliberate falsification of law", and referred the decision to the Law Society "for its consideration".³

The check the judge described hypothetically had already been admitted in the same court. In RSR Road Surface Recycling v Bonnechere Excavating et al, decided on February 4, 2026, opposing counsel raised a quotation from a Court of Appeal decision in a lawyer's factum: "While the Court of Appeal case existed, counsel could not find the quote reproduced in RSR’s factum." The judge gave the lawyer a recess to find it. The lawyer then conceded that he had used AI "to assist in preparing the factum", and advised the court "that although he had confirmed the cases referred to in the factum existed, he did not verify their content by reading them." The court did not rely on the factum, and reserved the misuse of AI for its decision on costs.⁴

The same failure appears in filings by people who are not lawyers, and before tribunals. In Muzyka v Tilk, a small claims decision of the Provincial Court of Saskatchewan of June 26, 2025, a self-represented plaintiff attributed a sentence to paragraph 44 of a decision that "is only 36 paragraphs long, and the quoted words appear nowhere in it". The court found "a pattern of changing paragraph numbers, and more importantly of deliberately misstating quotations", said that such misrepresentations "call into question the integrity of all of the party’s representations", and, for that conduct, awarded each of the two groups of defendants $500 in costs, within the $550 each recovered in all.²⁰ In a section 45 proceeding before the Registrar of Trademarks, a tribunal, a requesting party's written representations cited cases that do not appear to exist and misquoted the Act and case law, in several places inserting the words "and services" into quoted text that said only "goods"; they also included, in the Registrar's words, "a number of purported quotations that appear to be completely fabricated".²¹ The Registrar awarded no costs, because the owner had not asked for them within the time the regulations allow.²²

A real citation attached to the wrong case

A hybrid of the first two failures passes a check that the citation leads to a real decision. In Ko v Li, a lawyer's factum gave a case name, a neutral citation and a link to a reported decision; the link led to the real decision at that citation, a commercial real estate case that, the judge found, had nothing to do with the submission. A second link led to a real wrongful dismissal decision under another name, and the judge could not find the estate case the factum named.²³ In an Alberta case, a self-represented mother cited seven cases whose neutral citations "led to reported cases", but those cases "were not the style of cause cited and did not stand for the propositions nor contain the facts summarized" in her brief.²⁴ In the Federal Court, a self-represented applicant cited, under a case name that does not exist, a real neutral citation and two real paragraphs of the decision that bears it; those paragraphs, the associate judge found, "do not stand for the erroneous proposition" advanced.²⁵ A check that each citation resolves to a real decision passes every one of these.

The case exists, and holds something else

The third failure is the oldest. The court in Muzyka v Tilk drew the line itself: "even lawyers sometimes cite cases as authority for propositions which, on closer examination, they do not seem to support. I am not speaking of errors of that nature."²⁶ What the recent decisions add is how far the proposition can sit from the case.

Five of the decisions concern filings by lawyers, two of them about the same factum. In Ko v Li, the factum cited a real decision for the proposition that "the court removed a trustee for failing to account and for conduct that eroded the beneficiaries' confidence." The judge: "In fact, the opposite is true. The court did not remove the estate trustees."²⁷ The Law Society Tribunal later found, on the lawyer's admission, professional misconduct in a factum that "contained non-existent case law and which misrepresented what one case stood for"; in its account, AI hallucinations include "incorrectly stating what cases stand for".²⁸ In Hussein v Canada (Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship), the AI product counsel had relied on "hallucinated the proper test" for admitting, on judicial review, evidence that was not before the decision-maker, "and cited, as authority, a case which had no bearing on the issue at all".⁹ In RSR, during the recess, the judge read another case the factum relied on: "The principles set out in RSR’s factum did not match the findings of the court in that case."²⁹ In Mazaheri v Law Society of Ontario, a lawyer represented himself on motions before the Tribunal, and his materials "cited cases that don’t exist and real cases that had nothing to do with the points the respondent was making."³⁰

The other four are filings by parties without a lawyer. In X.L. v Z.L., the Ontario Superior Court of Justice found that two self-represented parties had cited real decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada and of the Court of Appeal for Ontario for propositions they "did not stand, even remotely, for": one cited on concealing assets "involves negligence causing a fire"; another, cited on fraudulent conveyances, "is a Charter case involving breaches of Covid regulations".³¹ In Mazac v Muise, the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia read the real cases a self-represented plaintiff said she had meant to cite, and found that one "cannot stand for that principle" and the other "does not stand for either principle".³² The Alberta and Federal Court decisions described above belong here too: the cases cited "did not stand for the propositions", and the paragraphs cited "do not stand for the erroneous proposition".³³

What the rules and directions reach

Since 2024, Ontario has added a certificate of authenticity to its rule on factums; courts in Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia and the Federal Court have issued or updated directions on AI and the material filed with them; and in British Columbia the Court of Appeal has updated a filing directive that addresses AI, and the Provincial Court has issued guidance. Ontario's Superior Court of Justice also has a practice direction on AI. Read for what each asks to be checked, the instruments fall into four groups: whether the authority exists; what it says; a general responsibility for accuracy; and disclosure of AI use. The table sets them out as we read them on September 24, 2026.³⁴

Scroll the table sideways to see every column.

Existence and authenticity

Ontario's rule requires a factum to include a statement signed by or for the party's lawyer "certifying that the person signing the statement is satisfied as to the authenticity of every authority cited in the factum". An authority published by a government, "on the Canadian Legal Information Institute website (CanLII)", on a court's website or by a commercial publisher of court decisions "is presumed to be authentic for the purposes of subrule (2.1), absent evidence to the contrary".³⁵ Both subrules were made in 2024. The presumption is about the authority. It says nothing about the words a factum attributes to it.

Two decisions of Ontario's Superior Court of Justice bear on what the certificate covers. In Ko v Li, the court described the certificate as a declaration "that the cases cited as precedents in the factum are real" and the rule as one that "codifies part of the existing duties of counsel to cite law honestly and without misrepresentation", and said that by leaving the certificate out, counsel "may have sidestepped the process designed specifically to avoid the issue that arose here".³⁶ In RSR, the court's finding went further. The lawyer had confirmed that the cases in his factum existed without reading them, and the court found that he had left the certificate out deliberately, because he "could not certify the authenticity of the authorities relied upon".³⁷ The finding was about that lawyer's omission, not a rule; but it shows that a court may treat a lawyer who has checked only that each case exists as unable to certify, whatever the presumption in subrule (2.2) says about the authority itself, and the same paragraph found that counsel could not locate the precise paragraphs the rule requires him to hyperlink. The factum in Kapahi did not include it either: the court's message to counsel raised the quotations and asked why the certificate was missing, and counsel acknowledged that he had not included the certification "in regards to the substance of the reply factum".³⁸ What the rule does not do is say what the reading must cover.

The same rule has a subrule that matters more for quotations: "Each citation to an authority in a factum must include a reference to the relevant paragraph, provision or page number of the authority."³⁵ The footnotes in Kapahi each gave "a correct neutral citation to a real case", but "there are no paragraph numbers included at the end of the neutral citations", and, as the judge observed, "Usually, when a quotation is taken from a case, the citation includes a paragraph number to directly pinpoint the reader to the quotation."³⁹ The Superior Court of Justice's practice direction adds that the paragraph cited must itself be hyperlinked, and Alberta's rules require "precise references" to the paragraphs of the authorities in a Court of Appeal factum.⁴⁰ A pinpoint is what lets a reader check a quotation in minutes. Without one, the reader has to search the whole decision for words that are not there.

Alberta's rules require a factum in the Court of Appeal to include a table of authorities with "a hyperlink to each authority, where available", and copies or extracts where there is none, and extend the same requirement to other filings: "Authorities referred to in a document provided to the Court must be cited in accordance with rule 14.25(1)(h)."⁴¹ The Court said that if the appellant in Reddy v Saroya had complied, "the non-existent cases would have been immediately identified."⁴² A book of authorities does the same work: in Zhang v Chen the court said that producing one "would have exposed the non-existence of the cases".⁴³ These are existence checks. A link or a copy shows that a case is there. It does not show that the quoted words are in it, or that the case at the other end is the one named: it was by following the links in Ko v Li that the judge found real decisions that had nothing to do with the submissions.²³

Content

Saskatchewan's Court of King's Bench names the quoted passage in its directive's operative words. Paragraph 7 of its General Application Practice Directive #12, effective January 1, 2026, reads:⁷

Any use of AI in preparing materials for filing or presentation must involve meaningful human oversight and review. Verification must be sufficient to ensure that, among other things, the following:

a) citations correspond to real authorities;

b) quoted passages are accurate;

c) summaries or analyses generated by AI accurately reflect the content of the source materials.

Paragraph 7 is written for "Any use of AI". Paragraph 4 is not: counsel and self-represented litigants "are responsible for the accuracy of all information, authorities and legal analysis contained in their written and oral submissions."⁷

The Ontario Superior Court of Justice's practice direction names the same failure. Among the hallucinations that counsel and litigants using AI must guard against, it lists "non-existent cases, mischaracterizations of case law, and fabricated quotations", and it directs that "All legal information obtained using the assistance of AI must be verified against trusted and authoritative sources." It adds: "The court will not tolerate inadvertence in this regard."⁴⁴ Outside the courts in the table, the Court of Quebec's notice of January 26, 2024, as the Nova Scotia Barristers' Society's guide reproduces it, asks for verification "to ensure that quotes and their content are accurate".⁴⁵

The Alberta courts' notice of October 6, 2023 and the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia's notice, first issued October 18, 2023 and updated February 28, 2025, use the same words: "any AI-generated submissions must be verified with meaningful human control", which can be done by cross-referencing with reliable legal databases, "ensuring that the citations and their content hold up to scrutiny".⁸ The Court of Appeal of Alberta has described its notice as asking parties to cross-reference AI work with reliable legal databases, "ensuring that citations and content hold up to scrutiny", and the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia has read its own to reach the proposition: the cross-referencing requirement "would include ensuring the cases stand for the principles for which they are cited".⁴⁶

These directions reach the content, and their verification requirements are written for work done with AI. Counsel in Kapahi said no AI was used, and the judge made no finding either way.⁴⁷ The duty to read does not depend on the tool. "It should go without saying that it is the lawyer’s duty to read cases before submitting them to a court as precedential authorities," the court held in Ko v Li, and later in the same matter: "Irrespective of issues concerning artificial intelligence, counsel who misrepresent the law, submit fake case precedents, or who utterly misrepresent the holdings of cases cited as precedents, violate their duties to the court."⁴⁸

Responsibility and disclosure

The Federal Court's notice of May 7, 2024, an update of its notice of December 20, 2023, requires a declaration in the first paragraph of a document that includes AI-generated content, "urges verification of any AI-created content", and states that the party signing a document "bears responsibility for the accuracy and veracity of its contents".⁴⁹ The Nova Scotia Court of Appeal's notice of March 14, 2025 and section 7.3 of the British Columbia Court of Appeal's Registrar's Filing Directive, in the version updated September 4, 2025, place responsibility for accuracy on those who file, without naming a check.⁵⁰ The Court of King's Bench of Manitoba (June 23, 2023) and the Provincial Court of Nova Scotia (October 27, 2023) require disclosure of how AI was used, and do not ask for verification.⁵¹ The Provincial Court of British Columbia's guidance of July 8, 2026, which is not a practice direction, says: "If it refers to a judgment (a judge’s reasons for decision in a court case), search for that case and read it yourself".⁵² We found no notice or practice direction on AI from the Supreme Court of British Columbia. On September 8, 2026 it adopted the Canadian Open Access Legal Citation Guide as its primary citation guide, a guide to how citations are written, which the Court said makes legal sources "easier to find and verify" and encourages reliable citation practices "particularly as AI tools are increasingly used in legal research and writing".⁵³

Most of this is recent. Since the start of 2024: Ontario's certificate and presumption; the Federal Court's updated notice (May 7, 2024); the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia's update (February 28, 2025); the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal's notice (March 14, 2025); the British Columbia Court of Appeal's filing directive as updated September 4, 2025 (when its section on AI was added we did not establish); Saskatchewan's directive (January 1, 2026); and the British Columbia Provincial Court's guidance (July 8, 2026). The Ontario Superior Court of Justice's consolidated practice direction was last updated March 17, 2026, and a judge of that court described its provisions on AI as recently published in February 2026; we did not establish when they were first issued.⁴⁴ The Alberta courts' notice and the Manitoba and Nova Scotia Provincial Court directions date from 2023, and we found no later version of any of them.³⁴

Every one of these leaves the reading to the person who files. A hyperlink and a declaration can each be supplied by someone who has not read the case. A certificate can be signed by one too, although an Ontario court has found that a lawyer in that position could not certify. The directions that reach the content say what the check must establish and, some of them, what to check against, such as "reliable legal databases" or "authoritative sources"; they do not describe the reading, and the only way to establish that words are in a paragraph is to read the paragraph.

How quotations go wrong

The decisions describe how it happens, and the guidance says what to look for.

Some quotations are invented outright and attached to authority a reader would not think to doubt. The quotations in Kapahi were not garbled versions of real passages; nothing like them appeared in the cases, and one was presented as written "for the majority" in what the judge called "the Supreme Court of Canada’s leading decision" in Sattva, where the Court was unanimous.¹⁵

Some begin with a real sentence. One of the Kapahi quotations opened with a sentence "similar to the first sentence of para. 33" of the decision it cited, went on in words that appear nowhere in that decision, and named the wrong judge as its author.¹⁶ A reader who recognises the first sentence has a reason to trust the rest.

Some are real words with the wrong address, or a changed text. In Muzyka v Tilk the court found real quotations under the wrong paragraph numbers; words removed from a quotation "without an ellipsis to show that he has done so", a deletion that "arguably changes the interpretation or applicability of the quoted words"; and part of a statement of a statutory provision presented as the Court of Appeal's own conclusion.²⁶ Before the Registrar of Trademarks, the words "and services" had been added to quotations that said only "goods".²¹

Some are a summary taken for the source. Saskatchewan's directive requires verification that AI summaries or analyses "accurately reflect the content of the source materials"; the Nova Scotia Barristers' Society's guide lists "misleading summaries" among what AI tools produce; and the Provincial Court of British Columbia asks litigants: "Did AI summarize the law or judgment accurately? If not, don’t use the AI summary."⁵⁴ The self-represented bankrupt in Re Gary Man Kin Ng had not read the cases and paragraphs he cited, "but relied on AI to do it for him."¹²

Some carry another decision's paragraph numbers. A decision that quotes another can carry the other's paragraph numbers inside its own text. Paragraph 7 of Kapahi quotes two paragraphs of the judge's earlier decision on the motion, numbered [72] and [73], in a decision whose own paragraphs end at 51; the endorsement reproduced in paragraph 14 of Re Gary Man Kin Ng carries paragraphs of Ko v Li, from [14] on, under their original numbers.⁵⁵ A pinpoint taken from a number in such a copy, without reading the paragraph around it, attributes the words to the wrong court, or to a paragraph the cited decision does not have.

Some come from tools built for lawyers. In Hussein, counsel had relied on a tool described as "a professional legal research platform designed specifically for Canadian immigration and refugee law practitioners", and "did not independently verify the citations as they were understood to reflect well established and widely accepted principles of law." The Court's answer: "I do not accept that this is permissible."⁵⁶

And some survive because the check stops at the citation. The judge's hypothetical in Kapahi, a check of "each case cited to ensure that it was a real case" without reading the cases for the quotations, is that check.¹⁸ In RSR the lawyer advised the court of it: he had confirmed that the cases existed, but "did not verify their content by reading them".⁴ In Ko v Li the court said counsel "might not have checked to make sure the cases were real or supported the propositions of law" she put to the court: two checks, not one.⁵⁷

What a check has to reach

The method below needs no product. It is what the decisions and the law societies describe, in the order a reader meets the problems. The Court of Appeal of Alberta has said that the time needed to verify case authorities generated by a large language model must be planned for as part of a lawyer's practice management.⁵⁸ For a short decision the time can be short: of the real case cited for the wrong test in Hussein, the Court noted that it "comprises 29 paragraphs and would take only a few minutes to review".⁹

Read the paragraph cited, and the paragraphs either side of it. Open the decision itself at the pinpoint. The neighbours show whether the paragraph is the court speaking, or the court reciting an argument or quoting another decision, and whether a number in the copy is the decision's own. Ontario's rules, and Alberta's for Court of Appeal factums, require pinpoints in a factum's citations; without one, as in Kapahi, the reader has nowhere to start.⁴⁰

Confirm the words. Compare the quotation with the paragraph, word for word: nothing added, nothing removed without an ellipsis, nothing brought in from another paragraph. Saskatchewan's directive states the standard: "quoted passages are accurate".⁷

Confirm whose words they are. They should be the court's reasons, and in a split decision the reasons of the judges the citation says they are; not a headnote or a publisher's summary, not an argument the court recites before answering it, not a passage the court quotes from another decision. The judge named should be the judge who wrote them: two of the Kapahi quotations named the wrong one.¹⁶ We found no Canadian decision from 2024 to 2026 in which a court found that a party had cited a dissent as the majority or a headnote as the reasons.⁵⁹ The step is in the method because each is a way for real words to misstate the substance of an authority, which the Saskatchewan and Manitoba law societies' guidance on candour tells lawyers to guard against.⁶⁰

Confirm the result. Read the disposition. The decision the factum in Ko v Li cited as one in which "the court removed a trustee" concludes its reasons on the applications: "For the above reasons, therefore, the applications are dismissed."⁶¹ Its result showed what the judge in Ko v Li found, that "the opposite is true".²⁷

Confirm what happened next. Check whether the decision was appealed, reversed or varied, and whether the reasons were amended after release: the copy of X.L. v Z.L. read for this article is the amended version of November 5, 2025 of reasons dated October 16, 2025.⁶² Search by the parties' names as well as by the citation: the appeal from the Federal Court's order in Arora v Canadian National Railway, cited above, was dismissed on April 15, 2026 under a different form of citation, 2026 CanLII 33472 (FC), in reasons that identify the order appealed from by its date.⁶³ At least one court has expected this of counsel. In Sull v Pengelly, the Supreme Court of British Columbia refused the plaintiff his costs of an application in which his counsel, among other failings, had given the court only a trial decision that "was overturned on appeal in relation to this very issue", and said: "The Court should be able to rely on counsel's authorities without having to note up, or otherwise confirm, the status and ongoing application of those decisions."⁶⁴ The Nova Scotia Barristers' Society's guide lists "outdated law" among the things AI tools produce, and the candour duty, as the law societies of Saskatchewan and Manitoba describe it, includes guarding against "misstating the substance of an authority".⁶⁰ Our article on technological competence covers correcting the record when a filed authority turns out to be wrong.

Confirm the proposition. Ask whether the court that wrote the paragraph would agree that it holds what the submission says it holds. This is the check the courts named in Mazac v Muise, "ensuring the cases stand for the principles for which they are cited", and in Ko v Li, where the duty is "not to mis-cite cases for propositions that they do not support".⁶⁵ Saskatchewan's directive asks the same of an AI summary or analysis: that it "accurately reflect the content of the source materials".⁷

Record who checked what. For AI-generated evidence, cases or arguments put before a tribunal, the Law Society of Ontario tells lawyers: "Keep a record of the steps you took to confirm the accuracy of this information."⁶⁶ A court has ordered the check at the level of the paragraph. In Re Gary Man Kin Ng, the registrar required the bankrupt to upload "full and complete copies of EACH AND EVERY ONE of the cases cited in all of his materials, with each of the cited paragraphs highlighted", to admit any case or paragraph that did not exist, and, where a case existed but the paragraph cited was wrong, to highlight "the actual paragraphs he is relying on".¹² No rule we read requires a record in that form for every authority; kept with the file, it shows who read what, in which copy, and when.

The law societies say the same in their own words. The table quotes, from the generative AI guidance of eight of them, what each says the check must cover; our article on technological competence sets out the guidance of every Canadian law society.⁶⁷ In the passages we read, Saskatchewan and Manitoba name the substance of an authority, Nova Scotia names outdated law and misleading summaries, Ontario names the record of the check for AI-generated content, and none names the accuracy of a quoted passage in terms.

Scroll the table sideways to see every column.

• Open the decision at the paragraph cited. Read it and the paragraphs either side, in a copy of the decision itself.
• Compare the words. Every word of the quotation against the paragraph, every omission marked, nothing added.
• Confirm whose words they are. The court's reasons, the judges the citation names; not a headnote, a summary, a recited argument or another decision the court quotes.
• Read the disposition. The result should be the one the citation implies.
• Check what happened next. Appeal, reversal, variation, amended reasons; search by the parties' names as well as the citation.
• Test the proposition. The paragraph should hold what the submission says it holds.
• Record the check. Who checked each authority, in which copy, and when.

When the check is not done

The consequences run from an authority ignored to a suspension. Courts have declined to rely on a lawyer's factum; disregarded the authorities in question, or every authority a party cited; ordered costs against a self-represented party for deliberate misquotation; and ordered costs payable by a lawyer personally, from $100 in Hussein to $17,550 plus GST in Reddy v Saroya.⁶⁸ The Court of Appeal of Alberta has listed what is open to a court, from striking submissions and costs to a penalty, contempt proceedings or a referral to the Law Society.⁶⁹ Kapahi ended in a referral to the Law Society of Ontario.³ For the factum in Ko v Li that misrepresented what a case stood for, the lawyer, who had also misled the court about her use of AI, admitted professional misconduct and was suspended for six months; the Tribunal found that she had failed to serve her client "by relying on a factum prepared by AI containing only non-existent and misrepresented case law".⁷⁰ In Ko v Li itself, the court had ordered her to show cause why she should not be held in contempt; after she admitted deliberately making untruthful and misleading statements to the court in that proceeding, it began a second, referred its prosecution to the Attorney General of Ontario, and in January 2026 retitled it to reflect "the criminal nature of the proceeding".⁷¹ Our article on technological competence gives the full account, and what may go on the client's account for the time a check takes is in our article on billing for AI-assisted work.

The check is the lawyer's

Every instrument above puts the check on the person who files, and the law societies put it on a person rather than a program: the Law Society of Ontario says the verification "should be completed by a human being, not the AI system itself", and the Law Society of Alberta that "Lawyers should never rely on Gen AI to judge its own accuracy."⁷² A tool can make the reading faster, and can catch a mismatch between a quotation and the paragraph it cites. It cannot replace the reading.

Where WarmLoop fits, and where it does not

WarmLoop is a Canadian legal research and verification service that a lawyer uses through an AI assistant. It works today with Claude, it is built for AI assistants that support the open Model Context Protocol, and each account is set up by hand during the current early access. It is sold by the company that wrote and published this article, so read what follows as WarmLoop's own account of itself, and put it to the same questions this article puts to any other tool.⁷³

Of the three ways a citation fails, WarmLoop's citation check is built for the first two, on the text it holds. For each authority in a draft it reports whether the citation resolves to a decision it holds under the name given, which is the check a real citation attached to the wrong case fails; whether the pinpoint holds; and whether the quoted words match the decision's text, which is the check the quotations in Kapahi, which "do not exist in the cases", could not have passed, and the one opposing counsel in RSR made by hand. It gives one of three answers for each authority, never a single one for the whole draft: verified, verify manually, or contradicted, and a quotation it cannot find in a decision it holds is reported as contradicted rather than left for opposing counsel to find at the hearing. A close match is not a word-for-word comparison, so comparing the words stays with the lawyer, and where it holds no decision at the citation given it says so and leaves the search to the lawyer. For the third failure it prepares the reading without doing it: it returns the disposition and the paragraphs either side of the pinpoint, so that the lawyer can see whether the words are the court's own or an argument recited, and whether the result is the one the citation implies. Its note-up helps with the fifth step of the method above: it lists the later decisions it holds that cite the case, with their treatment of it where that has been analysed and the share not analysed stated by court level. It does not show amended reasons, and an appeal decided under another citation, in reasons that identify the order appealed from by its date, as in Arora, may not appear in it, which is why that step says to search by the parties' names as well. Research and citation checking need no document uploads, and a brief published as a record carries the server's own re-check of every citation and quotation, dated, which is a record of that check its readers can see.⁷³

Where it does not fit is the reading itself. The first five steps are still the lawyer's to take, starting from the paragraphs WarmLoop returns; whether the paragraph holds what the submission says it holds, the sixth, is a judgment WarmLoop does not make; and the record the seventh asks for, of who checked each authority, in which copy, and when, is the lawyer's to keep. "Verified" means that WarmLoop found the case, the pinpoint and a close match for the quoted words in the copy it holds, which is an unofficial one; it does not mean that the authority is good law or that the proposition is supported, and a decision it does not hold is reported as not held, never as non-existent. Its Terms say that its verification features reduce the work of verification and do not discharge it.⁷⁴ That is where the article above ends: a tool can make the reading faster and catch a mismatch between a quotation and the paragraph it cites. It cannot replace the reading, and it does not review or endorse the argument the citation is offered for.