Courtready Research Published by CanLII Authors Program

CanLII has published The Rise of AI-Hallucinated Case Law in Canadian Courts and Tribunals, authored by Courtready’s co-founder Tom Macintosh Zheng, through its Authors Program.

The Rise of AI-Hallucinated Case Law in Canadian Courts and Tribunals, published in CanLII Authors Program as 2026 CanLIIDocs 738

The study reviews published Canadian decisions issued between January 1, 2024 and March 26, 2026. It identifies 132 decisions across 44 different courts and tribunals, spanning six provinces and the federal jurisdiction, in which an adjudicator flagged at least one fictitious citation in a party’s submissions.

In 96 of those 132 decisions, the court or tribunal found or presumed that an artificial intelligence tool generated the fictitious citations. In the remaining 36, the adjudicator identified the citations as non-existent but made no finding about how they were generated.

The full study is available on CanLII at 2026 CanLIIDocs 738. The underlying database, updated weekly, is at courtready.ca/fictitious-citations-in-canadian-courts.

We are grateful to CanLII for making Canadian court and tribunal decisions freely available. This research would not have been possible without that commitment to open access.

About the Publication

The study is published as 2026 CanLIIDocs 738 through the CanLII Authors Program. It reviews 132 published Canadian decisions issued between January 1, 2024 and March 26, 2026 across 44 courts and tribunals in six provinces and the federal jurisdiction. Self-represented litigants account for 82% of the affected decisions.