Haringey Council homeless application judicial review cites fake law cases
In a judicial review involving a homeless applicant against Haringey Council, the claimant's legal team submitted documents citing five non-existent legal cases. The court found this conduct to be improper, unreasonable, and negligent, referring the legal team to their professional regulators and ordering them to pay wasted costs.
The claimant's legal team submitted court documents citing five non-existent legal cases, including a purported Court of Appeal authority, which the court deemed professional misconduct.
Key facts
- What
- In a judicial review involving a homeless applicant against Haringey Council, the claimant's legal team submitted documents citing five non-existent legal cases.
- Incident date
- Apr 3, 2025
- Who
- Haringey Council
- Failure mode
- Hallucination
- AI surface
- Chatbot
- Severity
- High
What happened
During a judicial review of a homeless application against the London Borough of Haringey, the claimant's legal team submitted court filings citing five non-existent legal cases. The legal team initially dismissed the errors as cosmetic or minor citation errors after being challenged by the council. The court ultimately ruled that this conduct was a professional shame and professional misconduct.
What broke inside the model
- 01 · TriggerA user asks for a fact, a citation, or a figure.
- 02 · Model stepThe model writes a fluent, confident answer.
- 03 · Control gapNothing ties the claim back to a real source.
- 04 · FailureA fabricated fact ships as if it were verified.
- 05 · ConsequenceThe false claim reaches a customer, a court, or the public.
Confidence holds, and even spikes, as the claim detaches from any source.
The legal team relied on a generative AI tool to perform legal research or draft submissions without verifying the existence of the cited cases. The AI hallucinated plausible-sounding but entirely fabricated legal citations and ratios, which were then submitted to the court as precedent.
What it cost
Sources
- PressThe cases that weren't.nearlylegal.co.uk
- PressFake legal authorities - AI hallucination or professional negligencebclplaw.com
Cite this entry
https://failureindex.ai/failures/haringey-council-homeless-application-judicial-reviewAI Failure Index. "Haringey Council homeless application judicial review cites fake law cases" (FI-0519). Realm Labs. https://failureindex.ai/failures/haringey-council-homeless-application-judicial-review (indexed Jun 16, 2026).Data fields CC-BY 4.0, prose citation permitted. Incident ID FI-0519. Full dataset at /data.
Note from Realm Labs, the Index steward
How Realm would have caught this
- Prism
- OmniGuard
- AI Detection & Response (AIDR)
A runtime layer that watches the model's internal state can flag the moment a model commits to a claim it has no support for, and hold or reroute the response before it reaches a user. Realm reads those signals in real time rather than grading the transcript after the fact.