In Jones v Family Court at Whangārei [2026] NZSC 1, the Supreme Court used a published judgment to call out a litigant for citing case law that an AI application had invented. Meanwhile, Bell Gully had become the first large New Zealand firm to roll out Harvey AI to its entire 200-plus lawyer team.
What the Supreme Court Said
Justices Ellen France, Stephen Kós and Forrest Miller dismissed Mr Jones’s leave application after identifying that submissions cited several authorities that “appear to have been hallucinated by an Artificial Intelligence (AI) application”.
Specific examples included “Teddy v Police [2015] NZSC 62” and “Baird v R [2013] NZSC 120” — real case names combined with incorrect citations, while four genuine cases were misused to support propositions they did not stand for.
KEY TAKEAWAY: In Jones v Family Court at Whangārei [2026] NZSC 1, the Supreme Court warned that unverified AI citations in court submissions may, in serious cases, amount to obstruction of justice or contempt. A global database now lists six NZ cases involving AI-hallucinated authorities — so far all from self-represented litigants. Bell Gully has become the first large NZ firm to deploy Harvey AI across its 200-plus lawyer team. The supervised end of the profession is pulling ahead. The unsupervised end is being named in published judgments. Rule 13.1 of the Conduct and Client Care Rules already makes verification a practitioner obligation, not a discretion.
The Court warned that “misuse of AI in legal proceedings has serious implications for the administration of justice and public confidence in the justice system”, and that “reliance on false citations, including the unverified outputs of AI applications, may in serious cases amount to obstruction of justice or contempt of court”.
A subsequent decision involving an applicant whose citations were also identified as AI hallucinations confirms the direction of travel.
The risks for litigants and lawyers is very real.
Bell Gully’s Harvey Rollout is the Other Half of the Story
Bell Gully managing partner Andrew Petersen confirmed in July last year that the firm “is proud to be the first large law firm in New Zealand to launch Harvey, which will be made available to our team of over 200 lawyers”.
Simpson Grierson is taking a quieter, staged Microsoft 365 Copilot approach. Bell Gully partner Rosemary Wooders has separately argued at a TLANZ webinar that the Courts of New Zealand AI guidelines, drafted nearly three years ago, should be updated to address disclosure of AI use in submissions.
Firms with enterprise-grade, supervised AI are now visibly distinct from firms — and litigants — relying on consumer chatbots without controls. The Legal AI Hub tracks the divergence. AucklandSimpson Western
What should NZ lawyers and firms do now?
The Lawyers and Conveyancers Act (Lawyers: Conduct and Client Care) Rules 2008 already requires reasonable care to ensure court statements are accurate, and a breach may attract disciplinary proceedings, costs orders, and worse.
Every lawyer using GenAI for research or drafting needs documented verification, firm-level policy aligned to the Law Society’s GenAI guidance, and ideally an enterprise tool on the Legal AI Power List 2026. The next contempt finding will not stop at a self-represented litigant.
