Roll On Friday
A barrister and her solicitors have been condemned by a judge for their “appalling professional misbehaviour” after they cited non-existent cases.
Sarah Forey of 3 Bolt Court Chambers and the Haringey Law Centre manufactured five fake cases to support their arguments in a judicial review.
When the solicitors for the defendant, Haringey Council, said they could not find the cases, Haringey Law Centre lawyer Sunnelah Hussain replied with an evasive letter.
“We write in respect of your letter dated 13 February 2025 on the matter at subject is referred”, began Hussain. (“I have not made an error in reading that part out”, said Mr Justice Ritchie of her garbled opening line.)
Hussain claimed that “any erroneous citation in the grounds” were “easily explained”, but then failed to explain them, and dismissed the fake cases as “cosmetic errors”. She said she hoped the defendants had not raised them “to avoid undertaking really serious legal research”.
“That was, I must say, a remarkable letter”, said the judge, describing Hussain’s dismissal of the fake cases as “a grossly unprofessional categorisation”.
When she was challenged in court, Forey told the judge she kept copies of cases in a box and used an index of the cases and their ratios to populate her statement. “I do not understand that explanation or how it hangs together”, said Justice Ritchie.
“If she herself had put together, through research, a list of cases and they were photocopied in a box, this case could not have been one of them because it does not exist.”
“Secondly, if she had written a table of cases and the ratio of each case, this could not have been in that table because it does not exist.”
“Thirdly, if she had dropped it into an important court pleading, for which she bears professional responsibility because she puts her name on it, she should not have been making the submission to a High Court Judge that this case actually ever existed, because it does not exist.”
He said Forey had tried to fob him off with the line that they were “minor citation errors”, and it was only “when I challenged her” that she “backtracked on that and accepted they are serious”.
For a lark, the judge ran through the fictional cases. There was R (on the application of El Gendi) v Camden London Borough Council [2020] EWHC 2435 (Admin), in which a High Court in an alternate universe ruled on accommodation for the homeless.
There was R (on the application of Ibrahim) v Waltham Forest LBC [2019] EWHC 1873 (Admin), which supported Forey’s “wholly logical” argument, except that “the case of Ibrahim does not exist, it was a fake”.
Then there was R (on the application of H) v Ealing London Borough Council [2021] EWHC 939 (Admin), which was “yet another fake case. It does not exist”.
R (on the application of KN) v Barnet LBC [2020] EWHC 1066 (Admin) “sounds fine”, said the judge: “The trouble is, the case does not exist, it was a fake”.
Finally there was R (on the application of Balogun) v London Borough of Lambeth [2020] EWCA Civ 1442, which was a step up: “Ms Forey had moved on from fake High Court cases to fake Court of Appeal cases”, said Justice Ritchie.
The other side accused Forey of using AI, and while the judge said he couldn’t prove ChatGPT had spat out the hallucinated cases, the situation was “extremely troubling”.
“Ms Forey intentionally put these cases into her statement of facts and grounds, not caring whether they existed or not”, he said. “I do have a substantial difficulty with members of the Bar who put fake cases in statements of facts and grounds.”
He also criticised Haringey Law Centre for failing to check that Forey’s work was correct. “They should have been shocked when they were told that the citations did not exist”, he said. Instead, the solicitors “hid behind their letters, which I find were unprofessional”.
Determining that “This sort of behaviour should not be left unexposed”, he ordered his judgment to be published and sent to the Bar Standards Board and the SRA.
