Overview

• On July 23, the Pietermaritzburg High Court ruled against Philani Godfrey Mavundla’s legal team for submitting AI-generated fabrications, condemned their failure to verify citations and ordered them to pay court costs.
• A copy of the judgment was sent to the KwaZulu-Natal Legal Practice Council to determine whether the lawyers’ reliance on unverified AI content amounts to professional misconduct.
• The Legal Practice Council maintains that existing regulations suffice to manage AI errors and has offered free law-library access and webinars to help practitioners validate research.
• Human rights lawyer Mbekezeli Benjamin and others are calling for explicit amendments to the legal profession’s code of conduct to classify excessive dependence on unreviewed AI output as misconduct.
• This ruling follows previous AI-induced citation errors in South African courts and underscores a growing global concern over generative AI hallucinations undermining legal integrity.