South Korea’s Supreme Court surveyed 360 serving judges and found that roughly eight in ten have already presided over cases where lawyers or litigants cited court precedents that simply do not exist — fabricated or warped by AI. Nearly 92% of respondents now want institutional countermeasures, and the judiciary plans to push for fines written into the Civil and Criminal Procedure Acts, according to Yonhap News and Chosunbiz.
🔍 THE BOTTOM LINE
The hallucination problem has moved from an embarrassment for careless lawyers to a systemic tax on court systems: judges are now spending professional time verifying citations that never existed. South Korea’s response — fines, mandatory verification, AI-use disclosure — is the first full judiciary-level package aimed at the practice, and other jurisdictions are watching how it lands.
What the survey actually found
The National Court Administration polled 360 judges handling civil, family and administrative cases at every court level between 6–16 October, per Yonhap. Of those, 196 judges — 80.7% — reported seeing citations of nonexistent precedents in live cases, and 159 (65.4%) reported false-but-real precedents whose holdings had been distorted. Smaller but telling: 16.9% had encountered fabricated laws and regulations, and 4.1% nonexistent academic theses.
Who is filing the fake citations
The biggest surprise in the data is who, not what. Citing fabricated material was most often done by the parties themselves — 69.5% of cases — with counsel or attorneys implicated in 57.6%, according to Chosunbiz’s English coverage. This matches what the global tracking picture has shown over the past year: as generative AI tools have spread into mainstream use, the volume of bad citations from unrepresented litigants now rivals and exceeds that from professionals.
Judges described fabricated judgments that copied the Supreme Court’s formatting down to genuine case numbers attached to invented legal principles — fakes that survive a glance and demand a records check to catch. One case even included chatbot conversation text pasted verbatim into a legal brief.
The judiciary’s answer: fines, verification, disclosure
Some 91.7% of surveyed judges agreed institutional responses are needed. The measures on the table per Chosunbiz: fining repeat AI-hallucination citations, requiring verification of cited precedents, and requiring parties to disclose when AI was used in preparing submissions.
The National Court Administration says it will consult the Justice Ministry and submit views to the National Assembly to amend the Civil Procedure Act and Criminal Procedure Act — in other words, the judiciary is asking lawmakers to make fake citations an explicit, sanctionable act rather than a footnote in professional-conduct rules.
Why this matters beyond Korea
Courts everywhere are grappling with the same flood. India’s Supreme Court ruled in July that citing hallucinated judgments is advocate misconduct and that judgments founded on them are void; US federal judges have levied escalating sanctions, and a widely cited database of AI hallucination cases now runs to hundreds of decisions worldwide. What distinguishes the Korean move is its scale — a national judiciary surveying its entire bench, quantifying the problem, and proposing statutory penalties.
There is a New Zealand angle too: our courts run on comparatively thin resources, and a dispute that stalls because both sides are refuting citations that never existed burns the same public money whether the courthouse is in Seoul or Wellington. Any statutory verification duty or disclosure rule that South Korea lands first will be read closely by smaller jurisdictions facing the same pressure with fewer staff.
For now this is a proposal, not law: the amendment path runs through Korea’s National Assembly, and the reported survey figures come from the Supreme Court’s own research arm rather than an external audit.
❓ FAQ
What exactly did the survey find? Of 360 judges surveyed by South Korea’s National Court Administration, 80.7% had seen citations of nonexistent precedents in cases, 65.4% had seen false or distorted precedents, and 91.7% backed institutional countermeasures, per Yonhap.
Who was citing the fake cases? Mostly the parties themselves (69.5%), with lawyers implicated in 57.6% of cases — multiple responses were allowed.
Is it now illegal in South Korea to cite a hallucinated precedent? Not yet. The judiciary says it will work with the Justice Ministry and propose amendments to the Civil Procedure Act and Criminal Procedure Act to create a legal basis for fines.
Have other countries acted? Yes — India’s Supreme Court declared citing AI-fabricated judgments to be misconduct with void consequences, and US courts have sanctioned lawyers for hallucinated citations, tracked in a public cases database.
🔍 THE BOTTOM LINE
Once a majority of a national judiciary reports seeing fabricated citations, “the lawyer used AI” stops being a curiosity and becomes infrastructure strain. South Korea is first in line to write the countermeasure into statute — fines, verification duties, AI-use disclosure — and the scoreboard here isn’t punishment, it’s docket time. Every hallucinated case citation costs two sides and a judge a verification detour that the civil justice system has no budget line for.
📰 Sources
- Yonhap News Agency — survey report
- Chosunbiz — fines, verification and disclosure proposal
- Damien Charlotin — AI Hallucination Cases Database
