A lawyer has been struck off over AI citations, and the part of it that stayed with me is what he did once the errors were pointed out. The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal published its judgment in the case of Abhishek Kumar on 3 September 2026. He was a registered foreign lawyer, and he faced two allegations, one arising from a criminal conviction in 2024 and one arising from the authorities he put before the tribunal in his own defence. The tribunal recorded that this was the first time a lawyer's use of artificial intelligence in legal proceedings had been litigated before it.
Kumar filed his written Answer on 12 March 2026. Counsel for the Solicitors Regulation Authority read it and found citations that were wrong, passages that did not appear in the cases named, and authorities relied on for propositions they did not support. On 8 April the regulator put this to him and pointed him to Ayinde v Haringey LBC [2025] EWHC 1383 (Admin), the leading judgment on unchecked AI material reaching a court. His reply the next day, written to put the position right, was drafted with the same kind of tool and carried fresh errors of its own.
What the tribunal fixed on
The repetition did the damage. The tribunal found that Kumar had embarked on the use of AI without giving any proper thought to the consequences of so doing. He had taken no proper steps to check his output, and none to satisfy himself that the tools he was using were reliable. He described what he had done as technological negligence and said he had mistakenly believed AI was a lawful drafting aid. The tribunal read those answers as a persistent lack of insight rather than as mitigation, and it weighted the second round of errors heavily against him.
Two admissions in the papers sharpen the point. He told the regulator he did not have the expertise to verify the AI output. When asked for copies of the authorities he had relied on, he was unable to produce them, which left the tribunal with the plain concern that he had never read them. Dishonesty was not alleged on either allegation, and he was acting for himself rather than for a client, which reduced the harm he did. He was struck off in any event, and the tribunal recorded that it would have imposed the same sanction had either allegation stood alone.
What a smaller firm should take from it
The two defences Kumar ran are the two a partner in your firm is most likely to reach for. The first is that he had been out of practice and was unaware of the regulatory warnings. The second is that he lacked the skill to check what the tool produced. Neither saved him, and the second sits close to an admission, because a lawyer who cannot verify an authority is a lawyer who cannot cite it.
So settle two habits while this judgment is fresh. Whoever relies on a case reads the report itself before the document leaves the building, rather than reading the model's account of what the case says. And when an error surfaces, the correction gets written by hand, because reaching for the same tool to repair its own mistake is what turned a poor filing into a striking off.
Note also where the second failure happened. It was an email to the regulator, not a document filed at court. The duty to put forward only what is properly arguable runs through your correspondence with the SRA as surely as it runs through your pleadings. A firm that has trained its people to check court documents, while leaving replies to the regulator unchecked, has covered half the ground.
The judgment is published free to read on the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal website as case 12884-2026, Solicitors Regulation Authority v Abhishek Kumar, a 23 page PDF dated 25 August 2026, and Legal Futures reported the decision on 4 September 2026.
If nobody in your firm owns the rule about who reads the authority before a document goes out, that is a gap we close in an afternoon: talk it through with us.