Why India urgently needs practice directions on AI legal drafting

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has become a common drafting aid for lawyers, and the efficiency gains are real. But the technology has a well-documented weakness: it hallucinates. It produces case names, citations, and quotations that look authentic but do not exist. This is happening with increasing frequency in Indian courts. A bench led by the Chief Justice of India, Justice Surya Kant, recently flagged the problem directly, noting that even where citations are real, fabricated quotations are being attributed to judgments placing an additional verification burden on judges already pressed for time. Similar concerns have been voiced across other judicial fora.

One incident deserves special attention. The Bengaluru Bench of the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal issued an order in Buckeye Trust v. PCIT citing four judgments. Three were invented; the fourth existed but was irrelevant.