A lawyer has been struck off after he responded to an accusation that he misused AI with a reply that also misused AI.
Abhishek Kumar was already heading for a strike off following his conviction at Isleworth Crown Court in 2024.
Kumar was sentenced to 150 hours of community service after he pleaded guilty to paying an illegal immigrant cash in hand to work as his administrative assistant at the firm where he worked, Kim’s Law.
The lawyer was unable to argue that he hadn’t known about his PA’s immigration status, because he was the lawyer who had acted on their claim for asylum, and gave them the job when the application failed.
Despite this tremendous value-added service, Kumar’s conviction brought him to the attention of the Solicitors Regulation Authority.
As the SRA’s investigator reviewed Kumar’s response to its allegations, she found that a significant proportion of the cases he cited were wrong or irrelevant.
“SRA v Chan [2020] EWHC 1502 (Admin)” did exist, but it was from 2015, not 2020, and bore a different citation. While there was a case with the parties that Kumar had named in “SRA v James, MacGregor & Naylor [2018] EWCA Civ 1420“, the citation he gave was for an intellectual property case.
There were similar issues with other case references including Baxendale-Walker v Law Society [2007] EWCA Civ 233, which Kumar said “established that the SRA must act fairly”. Although the SRA said that “of course” it agreed with the principle of acting fairly, the case Kumar cited didn’t have anything to do with that.
Asked whether he had used a hallucinating AI to help him, Kumar submitted a revised response in which he admitted that he had, but blamed the issues on mental health challenges and stress (his, rather than the AI’s).
A check by the SRA revealed that this effort also contained erroneous citations and non-existent quotes from cases. When challenged, Kumar conceded that he had generated them with AI, too.
During the hearing, Kumar said he didn’t think that caselaw establishing that the misuse of AI created serious implications for the administration of justice applied to him, as he was a Registered Foreign Lawyer rather than a solicitor.
The SDT ruled that as a regulated individual, he was obliged to comply with the standards of his profession, and his self-confessed “incompetence and poor judgment” was no excuse. Particularly as, instead of rectifying his mistakes after they were flagged, he repeated them.
It therefore granted Kumar the distinction of becoming the first lawyer to get struck off for mishandling AI, which breached the “cardinal duty of a solicitor” not to mislead a court or tribunal. (The AI shouldn’t feel too bad, though, as Kumar would have been struck off anyway for offering illegal employment.)
As he was deemed impecunious, the SRA did not seek an order for costs.
https://www.rollonfriday.com/news-content/first-lawyer-struck-ai-addiction
