Picture propping a decision up at a party like it's still alive, hoping nobody checks the pulse until everyone's gone home. That's Weekend at Bernie's, except instead of a corpse at a beach house, it was four legal precedents that never existed, propped up through two separate rulings before a single soul checked whether they'd ever been breathing in the first place.

Here's what happened: a tribunal ruling in an Indian company insolvency dispute cited legal precedent to justify its decision, case names, quoted paragraphs, the works. Several of those "precedents" never existed. They were fabricated wholesale by an AI tool that hallucinated them, which is the technical term for when an AI confidently invents facts because its actual job is predicting what a plausible-sounding sentence looks like, not verifying whether something is true. Nobody caught it. The case went to appeal. Nobody caught it there either. It took two justices of India's actual Supreme Court, Justices P.S. Narasimha and Alok Aradhe, to notice the "law" everyone had been citing existed nowhere except inside a chatbot's imagination.

The court didn't just quietly fix the record. It voided both rulings, called the practice professional misconduct, and ordered the Bar Council of India to draft real disciplinary consequences, the legal system's version of finally checking Bernie's pulse and immediately calling the police.

The timing makes this less rare than it sounds. Use of generative AI among law firms and corporate legal departments has roughly doubled year over year, which means the number of lawyers who could theoretically pull this off just doubled with it. The fix already exists: purpose-built legal AI tools like Harvey, now valued at $11 billion, and Casetext cross-check citations against real case databases instead of just generating something convincing and hoping.

The lesson isn't "don't use AI in court." It's "check the pulse before you prop the body up in front of a judge."

Source: Bar and Bench — Supreme Court Sets Aside NCLT Judgment For Relying On Hallucinated AI-Generated Citations (https://www.barandbench.com/news/litigation/supreme-court-sets-aside-nclt-judgment-for-relying-on-hallucinated-ai-generated-citations)