A verified Supreme Court example
In Pooja Ramesh Singh v. Jammu and Kashmir Bank Ltd. & Anr., 2026 INSC 668, decided on 2 July 2026, the Supreme Court considered reliance on AI-generated material in insolvency adjudication. It set aside the NCLT and NCLAT decisions in the case.
Paragraphs 6–9 address unverified or hallucinated authorities and professional responsibility. The Court called for zero tolerance of presenting such material as precedent and directed the Bar Council of India to examine preventive guidance and disciplinary consequences. It distinguished this problem from rightful use of AI. These observations should not be converted into a claim that all AI assistance is prohibited or that every error attracts a fixed fine.
Read the Supreme Court judgment, hosted by the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India.
A practical authority-checking workflow
- Open the judgment. Prefer the deciding court's official publication. A search snippet or AI summary is not the judgment.
- Confirm identity. Match the parties, court, date, case number, bench and any neutral citation. Similar names can identify different proceedings.
- Read the cited paragraph in context. Check whether it is a party's argument, a quotation from another case, a factual observation or the court's own reasoning.
- Match the proposition. A real case may not support the sentence for which it is cited. Read the surrounding reasoning and final disposition.
- Check relevance and subsequent treatment. Examine the statute, procedural stage, material facts and later judgments. Authenticity alone does not establish that an authority controls the present issue.
- Keep an audit trail. Retain the official source, relevant paragraphs and the date checked. Review quotations and references again in the final document.
If an authority cannot be verified, do not present it as established law. Continue research or remove the unsupported proposition and explain the uncertainty where necessary.
Using AI responsibly in a legal workflow
AI can help organise questions, identify possible issues and produce a first draft for review. A database-backed answer may make sources easier to inspect; it does not establish that every generated proposition is correct.
Use a substantive checking step that can reject an inaccurate citation or conclusion. Renaming a check as human review is insufficient if nobody reads the authority. For work prepared for filing or advice, the responsible legal professional must assess relevance, accuracy and completeness.
What this article corrects
The earlier list of alleged sanctions and the draft-regulation account were not adequately supported by checked official material. They have been replaced by the identified Supreme Court judgment above. This article does not assert that every earlier reported incident was false; it withdraws reliance on those unverified accounts.
Correction — 20 October 2026: Removed zero-hallucination promises and unverified case anecdotes. Replaced them with an identified official Supreme Court judgment and a practical verification checklist.
