Turkey has opened prosecutorial and bar association investigations into a lawyer after a court filing allegedly included AI-generated citations of rulings from Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals whose case details could not be verified in the judiciary’s online database, Kısa Dalga reported.
The case stems from a civil lawsuit in Kızılcahamam, a district of Ankara, where opposing counsel challenged several rulings attributed to Turkey’s top appeals court, in a petition signed by attorney E.Ç., a lawyer with 25 years of experience.
According to E.Ç.’s account cited by Kısa Dalga, the judge said the decisions could not be found in the National Judiciary Informatics System (UYAP), Turkey’s online court records platform, in the form submitted to the court. The judge said the case details appeared to have been generated arbitrarily and referred the matter to prosecutors and the Ankara Bar Association.
The allegation centers on whether an artificial intelligence tool hallucinated legal citations, a term commonly used for confident but false outputs produced by generative AI systems. E.Ç. told Kısa Dalga that the decisions were not entirely fabricated but that the AI system attached incorrect chamber, case and decision numbers to material that resembled existing appeals court rulings.
E.Ç. said three lawyers worked on the petition and that AI was used only to add supporting case law to a legal argument that had already been prepared. Although three lawyers helped draft the filing, he said he was the only lawyer who signed it.
He said the problem became clear only after opposing counsel challenged the citations during a hearing. E.Ç. said he told the court he would review the disputed references, but the court initiated referrals to prosecutors and the bar association the same day.
E.Ç. also said prosecutors had not clearly identified the offense under investigation. He said he told investigators that the inaccuracies resulted from an AI-generated mistake, not deliberate misconduct.
According to E.Ç., the disputed petition was filed after opposing counsel accused court-appointed experts and lawyers in the case of accepting bribes when expert reports did not favor his clients. E.Ç. said the filing sought a judicial warning concerning professional ethics rather than further legal action.
The investigations have drawn criticism from some lawyers’ rights advocates, who say mistakes in legal argumentation should not automatically trigger criminal proceedings.
Emrah Altunoğlu, general coordinator of the Lawyers’ Rights Group in Ankara, said the case raised concerns about the independence of the legal profession and pressure on defense lawyers. He said legal arguments are subject to judicial review and that there was no evidence, based on the available information, that the lawyer intentionally submitted false information.
The case has attracted attention in Turkey’s legal community as lawyers increasingly use artificial intelligence tools for legal research, drafting and document review.
Turkey has discussed AI regulation and professional guidance on lawyers’ use of artificial intelligence, but it has not adopted a comprehensive binding framework specifically governing AI-generated material in court filings. The investigations into E.Ç. come as courts, bar associations and legal professionals worldwide debate how AI-assisted legal research should be verified before being submitted in judicial proceedings.