LLMMedium
South African Legal Team Reportedly Relied on Unverified ChatGPT Case Law in Johannesburg Body Corporate Defamation Matter
- Occurred
- Mar 1, 2023
- Published
- Jul 9, 2023
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
In a defamation case at the Johannesburg Regional Court, Rodrigues Blignaut Attorneys, representing plaintiff Michelle Parker, reportedly relied on purportedly non-existent legal judgments generated by ChatGPT to help argue their case. Magistrate Arvin Chaitram reportedly found the case names and citations were fictitious, causing a two-month delay. The court issued a punitive costs order and rebuked the plaintiff's legal team for uncritically accepting AI-generated research.
Developers
- OpenAI
Deployers
- Rodrigues Blignaut Attorneys
- Jurie Hayes
- Chantal Rodrigues
Harmed parties
- Rodrigues Blignaut Attorneys
- Michelle Parker
- Jurie Hayes
- Judicial integrity
- Epistemic integrity
- Chantal Rodrigues
Tags
- abridged
Classification
Category confidence: 95%
Severity confidence: 90%
Rationale: ChatGPT hallucinated non-existent case law, causing court delays and punitive costs.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8