By The AI Bar  · 

AI in Litigation: What Courts Expect Now

Where AI saves the most time and creates the most risk in litigation, what courts in England and Wales, India and Singapore now require, and a six-step workflow that captures the savings without the sanctions.

Litigation is where AI saves the most time and creates the most risk. The drafting cycle of a contested matter — from plaint or particulars of claim through skeleton arguments and trial preparation — is exactly the work generative tools accelerate. It is also the work judges are scrutinising hardest.

The Hallucination Problem Is No Longer Rare

More than 1,450 cases of lawyers filing AI-generated fictitious citations have been documented globally, and the rate has moved from roughly two a week before spring 2025 to five or six a day by mid-2026. Over 300 judges have now issued AI-specific guidance or rulings. In one US matter, three attorneys were disqualified, publicly reprimanded, referred to the state bar, and ordered to disclose the sanctions order to clients and opposing counsel in every pending case.

The practical takeaway is simple: never let an AI-produced citation reach a filing without opening the primary source.

Where Each Jurisdiction Stands

England and Wales. Judicial AI guidance applies across the courts, and R (Ayinde) v London Borough of Haringey [2025] EWHC 1383 (Admin) put the consequences of fake authorities on the record. In February 2026 the Civil Justice Council published an interim consultation on AI in court documents, including a proposed declaration for witness statements and disclosure obligations for expert reports. PD57AC continues to constrain how witness statements in the Business and Property Courts may be prepared.

India. In February 2026 the Supreme Court flagged an “alarming” trend of AI-fabricated citations in petitions, and the Bombay High Court imposed costs for the same conduct. Order VI and Order VII CPC still govern: material facts only, no evidence, no argument in the plaint. A separate trap is criminal drafting, where post-July 2024 pleadings must cite BNSS provisions rather than the repealed CrPC sections that older training data still produces.

Singapore. The Rules of Court 2021 and the Judiciary’s guide on generative AI for court users set the frame. Note the drafting difference that catches cross-border teams: Singapore pleadings do not carry a Statement of Truth in the English sense, so importing a UK precedent wholesale introduces an error.

What AI Is Genuinely Good At

Used inside a controlled workflow, AI reliably handles structure and speed:

  • Building the skeleton of a pleading against the correct procedural checklist
  • Reordering arguments by strength and mapping the questions a judge is likely to ask
  • Surfacing inconsistencies across witness statements and transcripts for cross-examination
  • First-pass triage in document review, subject to privilege controls
  • Compressing a long submission to a court’s page or word limit

What It Should Never Do Unsupervised

  • Generate case citations or quotations for filing
  • Write the substantive content of a trial witness statement, which must be the witness’s own words
  • Decide the legal theory of the case
  • Touch privileged or client-confidential material in a tool without appropriate confidentiality terms

A Safe Six-Step Workflow

  1. Give the model the procedural rule set and the facts, not a blank brief.
  2. Ask for structure and issues first, argument second.
  3. Draft with AI, but verify every authority against the primary report.
  4. Check jurisdiction-specific formalities: statement of truth wording, length limits, correct statute.
  5. Have a human sign off on the legal theory.
  6. Keep an auditable record of what was verified and by whom. Firms are already moving toward proving a pleading is hallucination-free before signature.

The Bottom Line

AI is now a standard part of litigation drafting in the UK, Singapore and India. The regulatory direction is toward disclosure, declarations and verifiable citation trails, not prohibition. Lawyers who build the verification step into their process capture the time savings without the sanctions risk.

Module 4 of The AI Bar’s practitioner series covers this in full, including 16 worked prompts across CPR, ROC 2021 and CPC drafting. See Litigation Support with AI.