Newsletter-4

In an interview with JUST. magazine, the Honourable Peter Lauwers, justice of the Court of Appeal for Ontario and chair of the Civil Rules Committee's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Subcommittee, weighs in on some alarming implications of AI-generated evidence, the crucial questions litigators should be asking themselves when considering when to introduce or how to respond to such evidence, and his worries about how a “head-in-the-sand approach” might impact our justice system.

You established the Civil Rules Committee’s AI Subcommittee because you expected that AI would soon be showing up in trial courts. What specific issues or scenarios were you seeing that rule amendments or additions might be required to address?

There were three provoking issues: First, hallucinated case precedents that might pollute the case law. Examples of such hallucinated case law put forward by lawyers occurred in both the United States and in British Columbia. Second, the use of invalid or unreliable evidence generated in part by artificial intelligence. Third, the intentional use of deep fake evidence to mislead the court.

You’ve referred to the “AI tsunami” on the way for those who work in the courts. What is your sense of how rapidly evolving the landscape is – in terms of the frequency and the variety of ways in which AI evidence is coming into play in the civil litigation process?

We are monitoring the situation, which led to the rule changes I mentioned earlier. There is a school of thought that AI is overhyped, but there is no doubt that law firms are using it for research purposes and are starting to use it in the formulation of pleadings and contracts. Whether those uses turn out to be problematic, time will tell. I am most worried about the use of AI in the generation of evidence.

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