What should we do if the other side's document looks AI-generated?

If a letter, statement of case or skeleton from the other side contains authorities you cannot find, quotations that do not appear in the judgment, or reasoning that drifts away from the facts, treat it as a verification task rather than an accusation. Check each point at source, record what you found, and then decide what, if anything, needs to be said. Whether a tool was involved is usually beside the point: what matters is whether the material is accurate and what it costs your client if it is not.

Check before you conclude anything

Documents can look odd for many reasons. A citation may be mistyped. A case may have been renamed on appeal. A quotation may come from a headnote or a textbook rather than the judgment itself. An unreported decision may genuinely exist but sit behind a subscription you do not hold. Plenty of thin drafting predates any use of AI.

So start with the ordinary checks you would run on any document that surprises you:

• Look up every authority relied on, by name and citation, in a source you trust.
• Find each quoted passage in the judgment and read the paragraphs around it.
• Check that the proposition in the letter is actually what the case decided, not a stretched version of it.
• Check statutory references against the current text of the provision, including whether it was in force at the relevant time.
• Check any figures and dates against the documents in your own file.

Only when something fails those checks do you have anything worth raising.

Work out what is actually wrong

There is a difference between a sloppy point and a point that does not exist. Sort what you have found into categories, because they call for different responses.

A wrong citation attached to a real case is an irritation. You can usually identify the case meant and deal with the substance.

A real case cited for a proposition it does not support is an argument you answer in the ordinary way, by reading the judgment and explaining what it actually decides.

An authority that does not appear to exist at all, or a quotation that appears nowhere in the judgment cited, is a different matter. That is not a point you can engage with, and it affects how much weight anything else in the document deserves.

Keep a note of which category each problem falls into, what you searched, where you searched and when. If the issue is raised later, you want to be able to show the work rather than describe it.

Raise it plainly and proportionately

The first step is almost always correspondence. Ask the other side to provide a copy of the authority relied on, or to identify where the quoted passage appears. That is a reasonable request, it is cheap, and it gives them the chance to correct an error without a fight. It also creates a clear record.

Avoid speculating in writing about how the document was produced. You do not know, you cannot prove it, and an accusation that turns out to be wrong damages your position more than the original error did. Describe what you looked for and could not find, and ask them to help.

If the material is before the court, think about proportionality. A minor citation error in a letter is not worth a separate application. A non-existent authority in a skeleton argument that the judge may rely on is worth drawing to the court's attention, politely and factually, usually at the hearing or in correspondence copied to the court in the ordinary way. Courts expect material put before them to be accurate, and parties can face costs consequences for work caused unnecessarily. Keep your client informed of what the checking is costing them and why.

When it is not the other side's solicitor

The same issue can arrive from a litigant in person, a client forwarding research they found themselves, an expert, or a third party responding to enquiries. The checking is identical, but the tone should not be. A litigant in person who has relied on something they did not know how to verify needs a clear explanation, not a reprimand, and you still owe your own client a proper response on the substance.

Where a document from a professional source contains material you cannot verify, ask for the source. Where it contains figures you cannot reconcile, ask for the working. Those are ordinary requests that would be sensible even if no one had ever heard of AI.

Keep your own house in order

The strongest position in this situation is one where your own material would survive the same scrutiny. That means every authority in your documents has been read by the person relying on it, every quotation has been checked against the judgment, and every figure can be traced to a document on the file. Make that an expectation of the team rather than a rule that applies only when a tool was used. If your firm can show its checking habits, raising a problem with someone else's work carries far more weight.

Where Alesis fits

Alesis reads official sources at the source, legislation section by section, official guidance and Financial Ombudsman decisions in full, and every point it makes names its source, with official sources opening in one click, which makes it quick to see whether a passage says what someone claims it says. When it cannot find support for a point, it says what is missing instead of guessing. It assists qualified professionals and does not replace them, and it does not provide legal advice.