Justice Fred Myers referred another lawyer to prosecutors in December for lying about using ChatGPT
An Ontario court appeared to be baffled by a lawyer’s claim that he did not use artificial intelligence to prepare a factum that included both real case citations and “wholly made up” quotations that he attributed to those cases. The court said this week it would refer its decision in the case to the Law Society of Ontario.
The lawyer in question, Khalid Parvaiz, had filed the factum with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice while challenging a costs order. In response, opposing counsel alleged he engaged in misconduct in the proceeding and flagged apparent AI hallucinations in the factum.
Justice Frederick Myers, who is presiding over the case, Kapahi Real Estate Inc. v. Elite Real Estate Club of Toronto Inc., asked Parvaiz whether he used generative AI to prepare the factum.
In February, Parvaiz told the court that while there were “clear errors” in his factum resulting from “a lack of due care,” he did not rely on AI or similar tools. He stated that his mistakes were “human errors” that arose from a misreading of the cited cases.
“These errors were not intentional but the result of carelessness and inadvertence on my part,” Parvaiz said. He added that, while it is not an excuse, he is a sole practitioner who was called to the Ontario bar only in 2022.
In a March 10 decision, Myers flagged multiple issues with Parvaiz’s response. While Parvaiz had admitted to five paragraphs of his factum that contained inaccurate quotations, Myers found seven. Reviewing each of those quotations, which Parvaiz originally attributed to real court decisions he cited, the justice concluded that nothing similar appeared in those cases.
The justice noted that Parvaiz did not include paragraph numbers at the end of the citations, which is standard practice.
“The alleged quotations set out in the reply factum are not efforts to quote an actual part of the case that contain a transposition error or two,” Myers wrote. “Rather, they are completely made up. Nothing like them appears in the precedents from which they are said to be quoted.”
Myers said Parvaiz’s claim that he did not use an AI tool to draft the factum left him “at a loss,” and that the lawyer’s claim that the fake quotations resulted from a misunderstanding of the cited decisions made no sense.
“The only way I can understand Mr. Parvaiz having made up seven distinct quotations is if he believes that counsel is allowed to make up law in his factum,” Myers said. “Perhaps doing it once could be some kind of slip or error that mistakenly found its way into the factum. But not seven times.”
The justice said he would not make a finding that Parvaiz used AI to draft his factum because he did not receive full submissions on the issue. However, he noted that often, “the cover-up may be worse than the initial error.”
In December, Myers set a national precedent when he referred a lawyer to the Ontario attorney general for criminal contempt proceedings after she admitted that she lied about not using ChatGPT to prepare filings that included AI hallucinations. In that case, Ko v. Li, however, the lawyer admitted to lying.
The facts in the present case are less clear, Myers said, adding he did not think a referral to the attorney general made sense at this time.
“There are other bodies, like the Toronto Police Service and the Law Society of Ontario that are equipped to investigate wrongdoing if they exercise the discretion to do so,” Myers said.
“In my view, on these facts, the best outcome to determine if there has been either use of AI hallucinations or deliberate falsification of law is for those with the authority to investigate to be left to do so,” he added. “It will be up to the authorities to decide if charges of one type or another should be brought.”
In a statement on Friday, Kaleigh Sonshine, a partner at Miller Thomson LLP and one of the lawyers who flagged the fake quotations in Parvaiz’s factum, said Myers’ decision “is an important reminder that, regardless of the tools used, we as counsel are responsible for verifying the law we put before the court.”
Parvaiz and a lawyer representing him did not respond to requests for comment.
