Ayinde v Haringey and Al-Haroun v Qatar National Bank

What happened

The Divisional Court heard 2 referrals together under its inherent power "to regulate its own procedures and to enforce duties that lawyers owe to the court." The judgment is reported as [2025] EWHC 1383 (Admin).

In Ayinde, a judicial review against the London Borough of Haringey over interim housing accommodation, grounds settled by barrister Sarah Forey and filed by the Haringey Law Centre cited 5 cases that do not exist. One was "R (on the application of El Gendi) v Camden LBC [2020] EWHC 2435 (Admin)." When the local authority's solicitors raised the problem, the Law Centre described the citations as "cosmetic errors," a description Ritchie J called "a grossly unprofessional categorisation." Ritchie J made wasted costs orders and referred the matter onward.

In Al-Haroun, a damages claim against Qatar National Bank, correspondence with the court and the witness statements of the client and his solicitor placed 45 citations before the court. Of those, 18 did not exist, and many of the rest did not contain the quotations attributed to them or did not support the propositions cited. The client had generated the research using publicly available AI tools. His solicitor, Abid Hussain of Primus Solicitors, accepted that he "relied on legal research that Mr Al-Haroun had conducted, without independently verifying the authorities."

What the court did

The court set out its powers: "public admonishment of the lawyer, the imposition of a costs order, the imposition of a wasted costs order, striking out a case, referral to a regulator, the initiation of contempt proceedings, and referral to the police."

In Ayinde, the court considered two possibilities: that the fake citations were included deliberately, or that generative AI was used and the account given was untrue. It found the threshold for contempt proceedings met but decided not to initiate them, noting factual issues that could not easily be determined. It referred Ms Forey to the Bar Standards Board and referred the Law Centre solicitor, Victor Amadigwe, to the Solicitors Regulation Authority. A paralegal involved was found to have acted properly. In Al-Haroun, the court did not initiate contempt proceedings and referred Mr Hussain and his firm to the Solicitors Regulation Authority.

The judgment states: "Freely available generative artificial intelligence tools, trained on a large language model such as ChatGPT are not capable of conducting reliable legal research." It directed: "A copy of this judgment will be sent to the Bar Council and the Law Society, and to the Council of the Inns of Court. We invite them to consider as a matter of urgency what further steps they should now take in the light of this judgment."

Where it stands

The Divisional Court's decision is final. The outcomes of the regulatory referrals were not found in the sources reviewed as of September 11, 2026. The judgment has been cited in later reporting outside England, including Australian coverage of the Nathwani matter.

The obligation it engaged

Both cases engaged Clause 3 of the Expert Record Standard (independent authority). Al-Haroun adds a feature relevant to any professional who receives material from a client or instructing party. The solicitor adopted research he had not produced and did not check. The clause applies to every item that enters the work, whatever its origin.

Ayinde also engaged Clause 8 (disclosure) in its broader sense. When the fictitious cases were raised, they were treated as cosmetic, and the court was left unable to determine how they came to be cited. A clear account at that point is what the court needed. Under the governing test, a competent practitioner using the National Archives or the law reports alone could not have produced any of the 23 fictitious authorities across the 2 cases.

Sources

• Courts and Tribunals Judiciary · June 6, 2025
  Ayinde v London Borough of Haringey, and Al-Haroun v Qatar National Bank [2025] EWHC 1383 (Admin)

What could not be confirmed

The amount of the earlier wasted costs orders in Ayinde and the outcomes of the Bar Standards Board and Solicitors Regulation Authority referrals were not confirmed. The court did not determine whether AI was used in Ayinde.