Two speeches told South Africa's lawyers to check everything. Nobody checked the speeches.

The record that arrived a year late #

In August 2025 the Sinako We Can Movement NPC held its 5th Annual Colloquium, sponsored by LexisNexis, under the theme Artificial Intelligence: Its Impact and the Ethical Considerations within the Legal Fraternity. Two people spoke whose words carry more weight on this subject than almost anyone's in the country.

Dunstan Mlambo had been Deputy Chief Justice (DCJ) of South Africa for a fortnight at the time. President Ramaphosa announced his appointment on 31 July 2025; it took effect on 1 August. From the podium he said he had been at the Constitutional Court for two weeks. That dates the event to the middle two weeks of August 2025. After 7 August, because the LPC chairperson also referred to something introduced "early in August this month". And on or before 21 August, when SWCM published its account of the colloquium in the past tense.

Advocate Pule Seleka SC is the chairperson of the Legal Practice Council, the statutory regulator of every attorney and advocate in South Africa.

Both said the same thing, and both were right. DCJ Mlambo: "there is no margin for error in the law because it affects people's lives… when we use AI, we must make sure we remain in control as humans. This is just a tool." Advocate Seleka: "what is happening is not the use of AI, it is the abuse of it… explore AI, use it carefully and double check whether the information it is providing to you exists."

Then the addresses sat unpublished for a year.

SWCM put the Deputy Chief Justice's address on YouTube on 5 August 2026 and the LPC chairperson's on 26 August 2026, a year after they were delivered. That is the fact this piece turns on. A speech is spoken once and gone. A video is a published document. It is searchable, quotable, citable, and it does not carry a date stamp on the claims inside it. Anyone who finds it next year will find two of the most senior figures in South African law stating things as fact.

Did anybody verify the contents of the speeches before they were published on YouTube?

"A powerful tool" #

Advocate Seleka told the room he found one passage from the English courts "very instructive", and quoted it. What he said, checked by ear against the recording:

AS DELIVERED — LPC chairperson, August 2025 "Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool. It can be a useful tool in litigation both civil and criminal. This comes with an important proviso however. Artificial intelligence is a tool that carries with it risks as well as opportunities. Its use must take place therefore within an appropriate degree of oversight and with a regulatory framework that ensures compliance with well-established professional and ethical standards if public confidence in the administration of justice is to be maintained."

The judgment is Ayinde v The London Borough of Haringey and Al-Haroun v Qatar National Bank [2025] EWHC 1383 (Admin), a Divisional Court presided over by Dame Victoria Sharp P, sitting with Johnson J, handed down on 6 June 2025. The passage is at paragraphs 4 and 5. What it actually says:

AS HANDED DOWN — [2025] EWHC 1383 (Admin), paras 4–5 "Artificial intelligence is a powerful technology. It can be a useful tool in litigation, both civil and criminal. […] This comes with an important proviso however. Artificial intelligence is a tool that carries with it risks as well as opportunities. Its use must take place therefore with an appropriate degree of oversight, and within a regulatory framework that ensures compliance with well-established professional and ethical standards if public confidence in the administration of justice is to be maintained."

Three differences, in ascending order of consequence.

The court wrote "technology"; Advocate Seleka says "tool". The court is doing something deliberate there. Artificial intelligence is a technology, which can be a useful tool. Replacing the first word with the second collapses the distinction and produces a flat repetition, "a powerful tool… a useful tool", that the court did not write.

Three sentences are missing, with nothing to mark their absence. Between "criminal" and "This comes", the judgment discusses disclosure exercises in the Business and Property Courts, a report recommending a cross-agency protocol on AI in fraud disclosure, and AI's likely continuing role in litigation. The quotation runs the end of paragraph 4 straight into the start of paragraph 5. We listened to the seam: nothing is said between "both civil and criminal" and "This comes with an important proviso." No "and so on", no signal of any kind that three sentences of the court's reasoning have gone. A listener has no way to know the passage is not continuous.

Two prepositions swap places. The court requires that AI use take place with oversight and within a regulatory framework. The quotation has it take place within oversight and with a regulatory framework. The second is the one that costs something: "within a regulatory framework" is the operative phrase. It is the sentence's demand. "With a regulatory framework" reduces it to an accompaniment.

The substance survives all three. Nobody hearing the quotation would come away with a false impression of what the English court thought, and that is worth saying plainly. But it was offered in quotation marks, as the words of a court, in an address about the duty not to mislead a court on a matter of law, and it is not what the court said.

The rules, checked #

Advocate Seleka's central argument was that no new regulation is needed, because the duty is already in the code. He is right about that, and he cited the code to prove it:

"You have article 57.1 in the code which says legal practitioners must not mislead the court on any matter of fact or law."

The Code of Conduct for All Legal Practitioners, Candidate Legal Practitioners and Juristic Entities was published under section 36(1) of the Legal Practice Act 28 of 2014, in Government Gazette 42337, General Notice 168 of 29 March 2019. Checked against it, paragraph 57.1 reads:

"A legal practitioner shall take all reasonable steps to avoid, directly or indirectly, misleading a court or a tribunal on any matter of fact or question of law."

That is very close to word-perfect, from memory, at a podium. It is a good answer to the question he was asked.

He then listed five more, and we checked each against the gazetted text. All of them exist, and all of them are apposite.

57.5 requires disclosure of "all relevant authorities of which the legal practitioner is aware that might reasonably have a material bearing on the decision". That is the provision closest of all to the hallucination problem, since a practitioner who has not read an authority cannot know what bearing it has. 3.3 subordinates the client's interests to the duty to the court, the interests of justice, observance of the law and the ethical standards of the code. 3.13 requires practitioners to "remain reasonably abreast of legal developments", which, in a room convened about a new technology, is doing more work than it looks. 3.15 requires them to "refrain from doing anything which could or might bring the legal profession into disrepute." And 3.4 requires them to "honour any undertaking given by them in the course of their business or practice."

That is the argument, and it holds. The regulator's position, that the profession does not need new rules because the duty is already written down, is supported by the provisions he cited, in the words he cited them in. Every provision he cited is real, and every one is on point.

There is one thing wrong in this part of the story, and it does not belong to him.

The Code of Conduct on the Legal Practice Council's own Code of Conduct page is the unamended 2019 text. That page carries one document. We downloaded it and read it. It is the Code as gazetted on 29 March 2019, and it still carries clause 21, "Misconduct". That clause was deleted on 8 December 2023, when General Notice 2235 in Government Gazette 49833 put a new clause 2A in its place. It has no clause 2A, no paragraph 3.17 or 3.18, and no paragraph 9.11. Nothing on the page indicates that the Code has been amended at all.

The amendments are published, on a different page. Under "Rules, Regulations & Amendments", beneath a heading reading "Amended Clauses of the Code of Conduct", the Council lists five separate documents. They are the 2019 gazetted Code, the 2021 insertion of clauses 3.17 and 3.18, a 2021 amendment to clause 13, a 2022 amendment to clause 9.9, and the 2023 insertion of clause 2A. The Code of Conduct page does not link to any of them.

And no consolidated Code has been republished since 2019. So a practitioner who wants to know what the Code says today must find the 2019 text on one page, find the amendments on another, and assemble the current version themselves. One who does not know the second page exists is reading a text that has been amended at least four times since, and is still being told that a clause deleted nearly three years ago applies to them.

And there is a small, perfect detail in the file's own opening page. The reason that particular gazette exists at all is a correction:

"Notice is hereby given that the Government Printing Works erroneously published General Notice No. 168 … under the auspices of the Law Society of the Cape of Good Hope instead of the Legal Practice Council."

The Code of Conduct for every attorney and advocate in South Africa was first gazetted under the name of the wrong body. In a piece about citing authority a reader cannot check, that is worth recording: the only text in this section that is demonstrably out of date is not the speech. It is the Code on the regulator's own page.

Read next

Folio 03 — Everyone read or heard about South Africa's AI policy that was withdrawn. How many people enquired if this was the first published draft? The framework the withdrawn draft was built on is still on the department's website today, and not one of its twelve references is cited anywhere in its text.

The Gauteng case #

Advocate Seleka turned to the second South African case of fabricated authority. He described it as "the Gauteng case, Northbound Processing", said the heads of argument referred to case law that did not exist, that "the judge picked it up and called counsel to order", and that it happened in June.

All of that is correct. Northbound Processing (Pty) Ltd v South African Diamond and Precious Metals Regulator and Others was decided in the Gauteng Division, Johannesburg, on 30 June 2025, by DJ Smit AJ. The judgment records, at paragraph 86, that "two cases cited in Northbound's heads of argument for key propositions on the mandamus, that could have been dispositive of this matter if they applied, do not exist". At paragraph 88 it records that even the corrected version "still contained two other incorrect citations". Junior counsel had produced them using a subscription tool called Legal Genius, which advertised itself as trained exclusively on South African judgments and legislation. The court referred the matter to the Legal Practice Council. He named no judge, and nothing he said about the case is wrong.

And there is a connection he did not draw, which is the most useful thing in the whole judgment. Smit AJ decided Northbound by applying Ayinde. Paragraph 93 sets the English guidance out point by point, footnoted to it. AI tools "may cite sources that do not exist… may purport to quote passages from a genuine source that do not appear in that source". Those who use them "have a professional duty to check the accuracy of such research by reference to authoritative sources". And where false citations are placed before a court "it is likely to be appropriate for the court to make a reference to the appropriate regulator." Paragraph 96 does exactly that, and the order directs the registrar to bring the judgment to the Gauteng Provincial Office of the LPC.

So Ayinde was not a foreign case Advocate Seleka was introducing to the room. It was already South African law in practice, applied seven weeks earlier, in the very judgment he was standing there describing. Which is what makes the three words in his rendering of it matter more, not less.

Not 29 July #

Advocate Seleka turned to the judiciary, and made the point that most needed making, that judges are not immune:

"recently a court in the US also … was found wanting, in a judgment of 29 July 2025. The judges had to withdraw their judgments… US federal judges, one in Mississippi and the other one in New Jersey… a temporary assistant used AI-generated research which was inadvertently included in the judgments without proper review."

The two matters are real and the account is broadly right. The date is not.

Both dockets are public, and both say 23 July.

Judge Julien Xavier Neals, District of New Jersey, issued an Opinion and Order in In re CorMedix Inc. Securities Litigation on 30 June 2025. Defence counsel wrote to him about it on 22 July. The next day he entered this text order:

"The Court is in receipt of Defendants counsel's letter dated July 22, 2025… On June 30, 2025, the Court issued an Opinion and Order… That Opinion and Order were entered in error. Accordingly, the Court directs the Clerk of Court to remove the Opinion and Order… from the docket." — ECF No. 126, signed Judge Julien Xavier Neals, 23 July 2025

Judge Henry T. Wingate, Southern District of Mississippi, signed a temporary restraining order in Jackson Federation of Teachers v Fitch on 20 July 2025. The docket entry for it carries its own correction: "Main Document 51 replaced on 7/23/2025."

So: not 29 July. One was removed from the docket as entered in error, the other replaced, and both on 23 July 2025.

The rest of what he said about the two matters can be checked against the judges themselves.

Both wrote to the Director of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts on 20 and 21 October 2025, answering questions Senator Grassley had put to them on 6 October, for onward transmission to him. The Senate Judiciary Committee published the replies on 23 October 2025.

Judge Neals: "the June 30, 2025 CorMedix decision was released in error – human error – and withdrawn as soon as it was brought to the attention of my chambers…"

And on how it happened: "As referenced in the Senator's letter, a 'temporary assistant,' specifically, a law school intern, used CHATGPT to perform legal research in connection with the CorMedix decision. In doing so, the intern acted without authorization, without disclosure, and contrary to not only chambers policy but also the relevant law school policy."

Judge Wingate: "a law clerk utilized a generative artificial intelligence ('GenAI') tool known as Perplexity strictly as a foundational drafting assistant… the original July 20, 2025, Order had been removed and was replaced on July 23, 2025."

So: two judges, one in Mississippi and one in New Jersey, both withdrawing orders, both attributing it to a member of staff using a generative AI tool. One of them was a "temporary assistant", the phrase the LPC chairperson used from the podium, and the phrase that appears in the Senate correspondence.

He was right about almost all of it. Two things are out: the date, and the staffing. Only Neals's was a temporary assistant, a law-school intern. Wingate's was a law clerk. The date is not a small thing when the point being made is that judges must check what a machine hands them.

There is a further point, and it cuts in his favour. On the day he spoke, none of the chambers detail was public. The Committee released the replies on 23 October 2025, two months after the colloquium. In mid-August the withdrawals were on the record and AI was suspected in the press. Whatever his source was, it was running ahead of what could then be confirmed. And it held up.

156 #

This is the finding that took the longest, so we will show the work.

"and globally in my research over 156 instances of lawyers using fake generated cases have been reported… 156, and most of them are in the US."

One place in the world keeps a running global tally of court decisions in which generative AI produced hallucinated material. It is the AI Hallucination Cases database, maintained by Damien Charlotin, a law professor at Sciences Po, and begun in April 2025. It counts only decisions where a court or tribunal has found or implied that a party relied on hallucinated content, not allegations. Charlotin describes it as necessarily an undercount.

We cannot prove Advocate Seleka was reading that database. He did not name a source, and no contemporaneous report of the colloquium carries the figure. That attribution is our inference, and we mark it as ours. But it is the only such tally, and the number fits it exactly.

Here is what the database showed, read off archived copies of the page itself:

"Over 156" is the database in the third week of June 2025. It crossed 156 somewhere between 15 and 23 June.

The colloquium was in the middle two weeks of August. By the morning of 21 August 2025 (the day SWCM published its account, with a Wayback snapshot taken at 11:58 South African time) the figure was 306. It had almost exactly doubled since the research was done, in roughly nine weeks.

Two further things the same snapshot shows.

"Most of them are in the US" is correct, then and now. On 21 August 2025: 198 of 306, or 65%. As at 1 September 2026: 1,364 of 1,994, or 68%. The next largest jurisdiction is Canada, at 214.

But they were not all lawyers. The database sorts cases by who used the AI. On 21 August 2025 the row for Lawyer stood at 139. The row for Pro Se Litigant, people with no lawyer at all, stood at 156. By 1 September 2026 the gap was wider still: 793 lawyers against 1,148 self-represented litigants.

We are not going to claim we know which row was read. It may be that the figure was simply the whole-database total, two months stale. It may be that a facet was read off the wrong line. What we can say without inference is that "over 156 instances of lawyers" was not, on any reading, the number of lawyers. On the day it was 139; the total was 306; and the one thing in the database that equalled 156 was the count of people appearing without a lawyer.

That last point is not a gotcha. It is arguably the most useful thing in the whole address, and it was inverted. The largest single group of people putting fabricated case law in front of courts worldwide is not the profession. It is the public, the people the profession is too expensive for. That is the Deputy Chief Justice's access-to-justice argument and the LPC chairperson's ethics argument meeting in one row of a spreadsheet, and neither address reached it.

What the Deputy Chief Justice's address puts on the record #

The DCJ's address was the more careful of the two, and its central claims are sound. That AI must supplement and not supplant. That public confidence in the courts is the thing at risk. That rollout should be "slow, cautious and carefully monitored". And that South Africa's context (the unrepresented litigant, the small firm, the person with no data) has to govern the pace. He is also, on the record, the Judge President who signed the Gauteng Division's mandatory-mediation directive. We have read it. Paragraph 13: "With effect from the date of this Directive, no case shall be issued a trial date unless the request is accompanied by a report on the mediation as contemplated in the Protocol." Signed "DUNSTAN MLAMBO, JUDGE PRESIDENT, GAUTENG DIVISION OF THE HIGH COURT, 22 APRIL 2025." Which is exactly what he said he did.

One of his claims does not hold. Several cannot be checked either way. One holds up better than he knew. And one claim made about him, from the same podium, does not hold at all.

Thurgood Marshall. "He argued 43 cases in the US Supreme Court and only lost two." The NAACP's own account of him reads: "He argued 32 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, winning 29." Thirty-two, not forty-three. Three losses, not two. The story he was telling is a good story, and it does not need the numbers: that Marshall built a legal fund because his organisation could not afford to take the cases that needed taking. And that South Africa should build one.

CaseLines and COVID. This one is the LPC chairperson's, not the DCJ's. Praising DCJ Mlambo from the podium, Advocate Seleka said this. "we were propelled into that direction by the pandemic, the Covid-19 pandemic… he did it during Covid, we are now in 2025, he started it when… DCJ 2021, because Covid hit in 2020." We have read the directive. Judge President's Practice Directive 1 of 2020 is headed "Implementation of the CaseLines System in the Gauteng Division of the High Court, Pretoria and Johannesburg". It is dated 10 January 2020 and was circulated to twenty-eight recipients, the Legal Practice Council – Gauteng among them. It reads: "The pilot phase of the CaseLines system commenced in Gauteng in the third (3rd) Term of 2019 and was extended to the end of the fourth (4th) Term of 2019. The full implementation of the CaseLines digital/electronic system in Gauteng will take effect from 27 January 2020."

It is signed "D MLAMBO, JUDGE PRESIDENT OF THE GAUTENG DIVISIONS OF THE HIGH COURT OF SOUTH AFRICA."

The National Institute for Communicable Diseases announced South Africa's first confirmed COVID-19 case on 5 March 2020: "This morning, Thursday March 5, the National Institute for Communicable Diseases confirmed that a suspected case of COVID-19 has tested positive."

Full implementation of CaseLines took effect five and a half weeks before the virus arrived in the country. COVID accelerated the adoption of a system already implemented, which is a better story about him, not a worse one.

The ushers. "the first job that was hit was the usher/messenger job… we took all the messengers, the ushers, [put them on] help desk." We could find no record of this anywhere: no OCJ statement, no departmental report, no coverage. Nothing contradicts it either. We are not saying it did not happen; we are saying it is not on the public record, and we would not print it as fact.

"The AI lawyer": the claim that holds. "a tool or a chatbot created here in South Africa… you access it via mobile apps. It provides ordinary citizens with easy access to legal knowledge and advice free of charge." The product is real and South African: My AI Lawyer, developed by Legal Interact with Legal&Tax Services. Its head of distribution told ITWeb in August 2026 that the first version was deployed in 2023, released on WhatsApp and then as a dashboard. It was distributed through Legal&Tax's own book and some seventy partner businesses before it was ever launched publicly. So in August 2025 the DCJ was describing a product most of the country could not yet have found, reached by texting a number rather than through an app, which is the one detail he got wrong.

On the substance he was right, and he is still right. We opened the pricing page ourselves. The first plan on it reads "Free · For everyone · R0 · 24/7 chat with AI Lawyer", a standing free tier, not a trial, sitting alongside paid plans from R49 for a day to R890 a year. The service has since added access by airtime, for R5, deducted off a prepaid balance. For most of the people he was talking about, that is a stronger access-to-justice claim than the one he made.

"The IJS". He referred to funding judiciary technology through an entity "created to source funds and fund government departments on technological advances". YouTube's transcript renders this as "the JS", which matches nothing. The second machine transcript renders it "the IJS", the Integrated Justice System, the long-running cross-departmental programme to modernise the criminal justice chain. Whether the IJS is accurately described as a body that sources funds is a separate question we have not settled, and do not assert.

Three claims we could not verify either way, and will not repeat as fact. That SAJEI held a two-day judiciary AI discussion: he dates it himself, "nearly eight weeks ago", which puts it in the last week of June 2025. That a judiciary committee "headed by techno-savvy judges" was established there. And his examples from Morocco and Nigeria, which we could not establish in the form he gave them.

The distinction this piece will not blur #

There is an obvious way to read all of this, and it is wrong.

These are not fabricated citations. Not one of the findings above is a case that does not exist, a quote from nowhere, or a source invented to support a claim. Every authority named is real. Ayinde is real and says almost exactly what it was said to say. Every rule cited from the code is real and every one of them is on point. Northbound is real and was decided in June. The two American judges are real and did withdraw their opinions in July. The database is real and the US does hold the majority. What is wrong is a word, two prepositions, a date, a count and a two-month-old number.

And these are speeches. Nobody speaks with footnotes. Both men were working partly from notes and partly from memory, in front of a live audience, taking questions. Every person who has ever addressed a room has misremembered a number in it. Holding an extempore address to the standard of a filed head of argument would be exactly the confusion Ukweli exists to prevent, committed in our own shop window.

And the record of these speeches is not what it appears to be. A later section sets out what we found when we set the two versions of that record side by side, because that is the most useful thing here.

So what is the finding?

The moment these addresses became documents, the duty attached, and the care that went into the record went into the spelling, not the substance. On 5 and 26 August 2026, SWCM published two permanent, searchable, citable records. In them the regulator of the profession quotes an English court in words it did not use. He gives a date on which neither American judgment was withdrawn. He attributes to COVID a court system that had already been implemented before the pandemic reached South Africa. He reports a global figure that had doubled nine weeks before he spoke. And in them the Deputy Chief Justice gives a count of Thurgood Marshall's Supreme Court record that the NAACP's own account contradicts.

And every transcript of them that we handled, including the one this piece was first drafted from, put things into a searchable record that neither man said.

None of it needed a fact-checker. It needed the last read. It is the same finding as Folio 03, arriving by a different route: the read that happens is not the read that is needed, and publication is the moment that stops being a private problem.

What happened in the year the videos sat unpublished #

Advocate Seleka was asked directly whether the LPC would introduce guidelines. He said: "Are we at that stage where we can introduce the guidelines? I think we are." DCJ Mlambo said the judiciary was "thinking of introducing a directive" that would require practitioners to disclose where they had used AI, and that a judiciary committee was working on a policy framework.

As at 1 September 2026, a year later:

• We could find no AI guideline, circular, rule amendment or policy from the LPC. We looked at its Code of Conduct page, its Rules, Regulations and Amendments page, its Notices and Advisories, and its Media Releases. We also read its annual report to the Minister on the state of the profession (the section 65(h) report, signed by Advocate Seleka at Midrand on 21 May 2026) from beginning to end. Its only section on the subject is headed "Technological Empowerment: Artificial Intelligence and the Digital Divide", and it is about access. Large firms are "reaping the massive efficiency dividends" while sole practitioners "risk being fundamentally outpaced and priced out of the market". AI literacy is "a non-negotiable core professional competency". And the Council hosted one webinar, in the first quarter of 2026, titled "From Briefcases to Bots: How AI is Reshaping the Practice of Law". It announces no instrument of any kind.

It also contains no reference to hallucination, fabrication, non-existent authority, Mavundla, Northbound, or any referral. Not one, in thirty-one pages. In June 2025 a judge of the Gauteng Division directed the registrar to bring Northbound to the attention of the LPC's Gauteng Provincial Office. Eleven months later, the Council's report to the Minister on the state of the profession treats artificial intelligence purely as an opportunity. - We could find no court directive requiring disclosure of AI use. The Judiciary's own register of Gauteng Division directives, the busiest division in the country, runs from 2020 to this month and contains no AI directive of any kind. A search of judiciary.org.za for "artificial intelligence", and for "intelligence" alone, returns nothing at all. - A draft judiciary AI policy exists, and it is still a draft. The 2026 Judiciary Conference met at Umhlanga, Durban, from 13 to 16 July 2026, under the theme "Towards a Single, Institutionally Independent, and Accountable Judiciary". Its adopted resolutions, which we have read, say at 5.2:

"The Judiciary Administration and Information Technology Steering Committee should finalise the Draft Policy on Artificial Intelligence…"

And on what that policy must contain:

"The draft AI Policy should clearly define the distinction between administrative and adjudicative functions by articulating, with greater specificity, the permissible and prohibited uses of AI."

So a policy is being written, for judges, by a committee, and had not been adopted as at 16 July 2026. It binds judges, not practitioners, and it does not yet bind them either. (A news report of 8 May 2026 describes a disclosure duty in that draft: that judicial officers must disclose any material contribution of generative AI and name the tool. We have not seen the draft and do not assert its contents.) - Nothing is in force. - The leading South African academic proposal on the question rejects a general duty of proactive disclosure. That is the revised Ethics Guidelines, published in De Rebus on 1 July 2026 by a UKZN-led drafting team, after a year of consultation in which several commentators pressed for one. Its reasoning is worth reading against everything above. A generic notice that "AI has been used" tells the client nothing about quality. The rule could not be enforced against a practitioner who denied it. And "a rule whose breach cannot be established is a gesture, not a rule." What it puts in disclosure's place is a verification discipline: "Every citation relied on should be confirmed from a primary source; every quotation verified verbatim." That sentence is the argument of this folio, written by law academics, ten months after these two addresses were delivered, and a month before the first of them was published.

And the register moved. On 21 August 2025 the Charlotin database held three South African cases. The snapshot records the count, not the names. Of the six it holds now, exactly three are dated before that day. They are Parker v Forsyth NNO (Johannesburg Regional Court, 29 June 2023), Mavundla (KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 8 January 2025) and Northbound Processing (Gauteng, 30 June 2025). So those are almost certainly the three. Almost certainly is not certainly, and we mark it: the database also grows backwards as older cases are found, so a South African case added later could have displaced one of them. As at 1 September 2026 it holds six. The three added are:

Two of the three are judgments. The database records both as a judge using AI, and records a bar referral in FJL v TGO.

We are not describing what that court found. A law-firm alert reports detailed findings about fabricated material in that matter. The judgment is unreported and we could not obtain it, so what we print is what the register records and what we read there ourselves.

That is the year. Advocate Seleka warned that the judiciary "may not be immune to the dangers of unvetted AI use", and named two American judges to prove it. Within twelve months, two of the six South African entries in the global register were South African judgments.

And one line in those resolutions deserves to be read next to everything above. Having resolved that a policy must be finished, the Judiciary went on, at 5.4, to name what it will use AI for first:

"The Judiciary should leverage AI through customised and secure platforms, initially focusing on efficiency tools, including court recording and transcription, translation, case management and document summarisation, to reduce delays and enhance access to justice."

Transcription is the first item on the list. The courts intend to put machine transcription into the record of proceedings. What that has already done to these two addresses, and what became of the accurate version somebody had made of them, is the subject of the section that closes this piece.

Resolution 5.5 anticipates the answer, and it is the right one: education in the responsible use of AI, "including prompt design and verification". The word is in the Judiciary's own resolution. What it will mean in practice is somebody reading the transcript against the recording before it becomes the record.

What our own register shows, and what it cannot #

We keep Integrity Watch ourselves, so we are going to turn it on this question, and then say plainly what it is not evidence of.

Read on 1 September 2026, the register held 85 verified incidents, dated back to 2023, each one a document corrected, withdrawn, refunded or sanctioned after fabricated material was found in it. Sorted by the sector the document came from:

Sixteen legal incidents in the twelve months of 2025. Thirty in under eight months of 2026. The register is becoming a legal register.

Now the part that matters more than the numbers.

This is not evidence that lawyers fabricate more than anyone else. It cannot be. A register counts what someone found, and what someone found depends on where they looked and what gets published. Ours is denser on recent, English-language material, and our weekly scan draws heavily on judgments, because judgments are what a scan can read.

But that last point is not only a limitation. It is very close to the explanation.

Courts are almost the only institution that publishes its own failures. When a lawyer files a fabricated citation, a judge writes it down, gives it a case number, and puts it on a public database with the practitioner's name in it. When a consultancy files a fabricated citation in a client report, or a company in a board pack, or a government department in an internal brief, nothing of the sort happens. There is no judgment. There is usually no record at all, unless a journalist gets hold of it.

So the legal sector's 70% is not a measure of how much lawyers fabricate. It is a measure of how much law shows its working. There is no reason to think other sectors do better. There is simply no comparable record. If any other profession published a written, reasoned, citable finding every time one of its members put unverifiable material in a document, the shape of this table would change completely.

That is worth saying because it inverts the obvious reading, and because the profession being written about here comes out of it better than it looks.

South Africa

Four South African entries, and the movement in them is not about volume.

→ See the South African entries in the register

In 2025 the fabricated authority was in a lawyer's papers. In 2026 both South African court entries are judgments. That is not a count that density can explain away. It is a change in who, and it happened within twelve months of the chairperson of the Legal Practice Council standing at a podium and saying the judiciary may not be immune.

And our own register is incomplete on exactly this point. Read on the same day, it did not hold Parker v Forsyth (2023), the first South African case of all. It did not hold Northbound Processing (June 2025), which this piece discusses at length. And it did not hold Roux v van Greunen (January 2026). All three are in Charlotin's database. So the South African rows above are what our register happens to hold, not a national count. We are not drawing a South African trend off a register we know has three South African gaps in it. The gaps are being worked.

The accurate transcript is a picture #

The LPC chairperson's address was first read here through YouTube's transcript, the panel you open with "Show transcript", the one you can search, copy and quote. At the passage where he lists the provisions of the Code of Conduct that already govern this problem, it reads:

21:23 conduct 57.5 3.3 3.13 3.15.4

There is no paragraph 3.15.4 in the Code. Paragraph 3.15 reads, in full, "refrain from doing anything which could or might bring the legal profession into disrepute", a single undivided line. Clause 3 runs 3.14, 3.15, 3.16 without a break, and the only place it subdivides is 3.3. The string does not appear in the file the Legal Practice Council publishes, or in the rendering carried by legal publishers.

He did not say it. Played back and listened to, the passage is four separate numbers: 3.3, 3.13, 3.15 and 3.4, every one a real provision, every one apposite. 3.4 requires practitioners to honour their undertakings.

This is the part we did not expect, and it is the finding.

Play the video and at 21:23 the screen displays:

"the Code of Conduct, 57.5." … "3.3, 3.13, 3.15, 3.4. Your duties to the…"

Four numbers. Correct. Punctuated, capitalised, right.

Open the transcript panel on the same video and the same passage reads "conduct 57.5 3.3 3.13 3.15.4". That is a rule number which has never existed in South African law, in a passage where the regulator of the profession is telling practitioners which rules bind them.

We assumed at first that YouTube was serving one auto-generated transcript in two places and contradicting itself. It is not. The truth is worse.

The words on screen are not subtitles at all. They are burned into the video image. Switch YouTube's captions off: its own caption container then holds no text whatever, and the CC button reports itself as off. And the words stay exactly where they were, sitting on the same layer as the channel's watermark. We ran that test on both videos and photographed the result.

Every caption track YouTube offers on either video is machine-generated: twenty-one languages on each, all automatic, and not one supplied by the publisher.

So the publisher made an accurate transcript and painted it onto the pixels. The platform made its own from the audio, got it wrong, and that is the one attached to the page as text.

The picture is right in all seven places we checked. The text is wrong in all seven.

Which of the two does anybody actually use? Nobody quotes from a screenshot. You open the transcript, because that is the version you can search, copy and paste into a document, and it is the version a search engine, a citation checker or a language model reads. The accurate rendering scrolls past and disappears. The defective one is the one that gets carried into other people's work.

Somebody at SWCM did the job properly, at least everywhere we looked. Getting "Mokgoro", "Marwala", "Zannah" and "SAJEI" right takes a person who knows who these people are. That work was done, and then rendered unreadable by the format it was published in.

That is the whole mechanism, in a single video: the copy that is easiest to reuse is the copy that is wrong, and nothing on the page tells you the two differ.

Ukweli reads a document before it goes out and tells you which of its claims, quotes and sources cannot be confirmed. Put a document through it →