The Brief
Issue 14 · 8 September 2026
France's notaires picked their AI. The deciding factor was where it runs.
France's notariat chose a French model on French infrastructure. Ireland's High Court now wants experts to declare they did not use one. And a rule that never existed cost a firm its name in a published judgment.
The Conseil supérieur du notariat has selected Mistral AI and Scaleway under an 18-month partnership, part of the digital strategy the profession adopted in 2024. The tools run on sovereign infrastructure provided by the French host Scaleway. The requirement the CSN puts at the centre of its announcement is le respect du secret professionnel du notaire, and it frames the whole exercise as staying an innovative profession sans faire aucune concession sur la sécurisation des données, without conceding anything on securing the data.
Two details are worth more than the headline. Adoption is voluntary: Les notaires resteront naturellement libres de recourir ou non à ces outils. Nobody is being compelled. And the technology arrives with an AI charter distributed to the profession alongside it, so the rules of use land at the same time as the capability instead of several years behind it.
What makes this worth your attention is who decided it. Not a vendor making a pitch, not a regulator imposing a rule. A regulated profession, choosing its own procurement terms, concluding that generative AI touching privileged client files has to run on European infrastructure under European control, and putting professional secrecy ahead of picking the largest model available. That is now a reference point a client can hold your practice to, whatever jurisdiction you sit in.
Ireland now asks every expert to declare it
Practice Direction HC 142, Responsible Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Court Documents, was signed on 29 July and came into operation on 1 September. It reaches pleadings, submissions, affidavits, witness statements and expert reports.
The expert declaration is the part that changes daily practice. Every expert report now opens with a statement: “I declare that, save as otherwise expressly stated, Generative Artificial Intelligence has not been used for the purposes of generating the substantive content of this report which reflects my own opinions, knowledge and evidence.” That is not a disclosure made when someone asks. It sits on the face of the document, by default, every time.
The consequences are not decorative either. The direction sets out adverse cost orders, orders disregarding or rejecting court documents in whole or in part, and the striking out of a claim or defence. Practitioners can be referred to the Legal Services Regulatory Authority or their professional body, and personal costs orders can follow. Ireland has had guidance on this before. This is the first time it comes with teeth attached.
A rule that never existed, and a firm named in the judgment
In Cork v Smith [2026] EWHC 1199 (Ch), handed down on 22 May, ICC Judge Mullen set out what happened when a junior solicitor at Pinsent Masons used AI to draft two letters to the court on a block transfer application. The AI produced a quotation from Insolvency Rule 12.37(5) that does not appear anywhere in the rule. The junior stripped the quotation marks off it and otherwise left it presented as a genuine statutory provision. The court, in the judge's words, was misled not once but twice.
On the evidence the judge found serious carelessness rather than dishonesty, and his description of the mechanism is the sentence to keep: “There is nothing to suggest that LA checked any of the references generated by the AI and LA seems to have almost entirely outsourced the thinking process to the program.”
What he did about it matters more than what happened. He held that “This is plainly a case where admonishment is insufficient”, but also that mere negligence as to the falsity of the material does not justify contempt proceedings, and that taking contempt further would be disproportionate. He settled instead on publishing the judgment as a public admonishment of the firm and its two supervising solicitors, alongside the referral the firm had already made to the SRA on its own initiative, as “the proportionate response”. Pinsent Masons was required to put the judgment in front of the SRA within two working days.
Note where the failure sits. This is not invented case law from a sole practitioner working without a net. It is supervision, in a firm with plenty of it. The judgment is explicit that supervisors remain accountable for the work of the lawyers they supervise, and that is exactly where the consequence landed.
Approved judgment, Cork v Smith [2026] EWHC 1199 (Ch)·Legal Futures
The citations were fake. The case went with them.
In LeDouxx v. Outliers, Inc., 2026 WL 2408808 (W.D. Wash., 18 August), a plaintiff's expert report carried citations to academic articles that do not exist. Counsel acknowledged she had helped prepare the reports, and that the bad citations came out of AI tools she did not understand how to operate. The experts had not checked them either.
The court excluded the expert's opinions under Federal Rule of Evidence 702, finding that the hallucinated citations “shatter ... his credibility with this Court”. With no admissible expert evidence left standing, it granted summary judgment and dismissed the claims with prejudice.
Nearly every fabricated-citation story of the last two years has ended with a fine against the lawyer who filed it. This one did not. The consequence attached to the evidence, and through the evidence to the case itself. The client lost, permanently, over a document the lawyer did not write and nobody read closely enough.
Our read
Four items, one pattern. The profession has stopped debating whether AI belongs in practice and started writing down the terms. France's notariat wrote them into a procurement contract and chose infrastructure and professional secrecy over model size. Ireland wrote them into a practice direction, with a declaration printed on the face of every expert report. An English court wrote them into a published judgment and put a firm's name in it. Washington shows the alternative. Nothing was written down, nothing was checked, the expert was excluded and the case died with him. Two of these four are what it looks like when a profession builds process ahead of the failure. Two are what it looks like afterwards. The distance between them is the entire argument.
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