An immigration lawyer could face a disciplinary investigation after a judge ruled he used artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT to prepare his legal research.
A court heard a judge was left baffled when Chowdhury Rahman made his allegations, which included citing cases that were “completely fictitious” or “totally irrelevant”.
A judge found that Mr Rahman had also attempted to “conceal” this when questioned and had “wasted” the court’s time.
The incident occurred while Rahman was representing two Honduran sisters who were seeking asylum in the UK because they were being attacked by a violent criminal gang called Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13).
After arriving at Heathrow Airport in June 2022, they applied for asylum and said during selection interviews that the gang wanted them to be “their women.”
They also claimed that gang members had threatened to kill their families and had been searching for them since they left the country.
In November 2023, the Home Office rejected his asylum application, stating that his accounts were “inconsistent and not supported by documentary evidence.”
They appealed the matter to the trial court, but the request was dismissed by a judge who “did not accept that the appellants were the subject of adverse attention” by MS-13.
It was then appealed to the High Court, with Mr Rahman acting as counsel. During the hearing, he argued that the judge had not adequately assessed credibility, had made an error of law in evaluating documentary evidence, and had not considered the impact of the internal relocation.
However, these claims were equally rejected by Judge Mark Blundell, who dismissed the appeal and ruled that “nothing said by Mr. Rahman orally or in writing establishes an error of law on the part of the judge.”
However, in a postscript to the judgment, Judge Blundell referred to “significant issues” that had arisen on appeal in relation to Mr Rahman’s legal research.
Of the 12 authorities cited in the appeal, the judge discovered when reading that some did not even exist, and that others “did not support the propositions of law for which they were cited in the foundation.”
Investigating this, he found that Mr Rahman seemed “unfamiliar” with legal search engines and was “consistently unable to understand” where to direct the judge in the cases he had cited.
Rahman said he had used “several websites” to conduct his research, and the judge noted that one of the cases cited had recently been misused by ChatGPT in another legal case.
Judge Blundell noted that since Rahman “appeared to know nothing” about any of the authorities he had cited, some of whom did not exist, all of his submissions were therefore “misleading”.
“It is overwhelmingly likely, in my judgment, that Mr. Rahman used Generative Artificial Intelligence to formulate the grounds of appeal in this case, and that he attempted to conceal that fact from me during the hearing,” Judge Blundell said.
“He has been called to the Bar of England and Wales, and it is simply not possible that he has misinterpreted all the authorities cited in the grounds of appeal to the extent that I have set out above.”
He concluded that he was now considering reporting Mr Rahman to the Bar Standards Board.