In a ruling this week, BCCA Justice Susan Griffin says AI has introduced access to justice issues
As individuals representing themselves in court increasingly rely on artificial intelligence tools to prepare their court submissions, courts will likely have to invest more resources into wading through both hallucinated materials and long lists of irrelevant citations, a justice for the British Columbia Court of Appeal warned litigants on Wednesday.
It’s a development that’s raising access to justice concerns, BCCA Justice Susan Griffin wrote in her decision in 1182573 B.C. Ltd. v Gerber, a civil case involving a self-represented party who told the justice he had relied on AI to prepare his submissions.
“Judges are a limited human resource. They must organize their time to best serve the broader public in deciding disputes based on established legal principles and evidence,” Griffin wrote.
“Judges cannot provide an unlimited audience to litigants who have relied on AI to generate submissions that are not relevant,” the justice added. “Judges will not always have time to explain at length that an AI-generated argument is baseless. Judges have to focus their attention on the issues that are truly legally relevant in a particular case.”
Griffin’s ruling is the latest in a series of Canadian court decisions that have addressed litigants’ and lawyers’ use of AI tools to prepare court submissions in recent years. Many of these decisions deal with hallucinated material – such as fake cases or arguments wrongly attributed to real rulings – or with how individual lawyers or self-represented litigants have responded once they were caught submitting AI-generated, misleading filings.
But Griffin’s ruling – which does not identify any specific AI-generated errors in the parties’ submissions – lays out the systemic risks that she argues the justice system is facing.
In addition to hallucinations and the tendency of many AI tools to generate long lists of case citations that may be irrelevant, the justice says she’s observed a growing trend: courts receiving “pleadings and submissions that are unduly lengthy and verbose, containing ‘legal’ language untethered from established legal principles, and which are incomprehensible.”
Noting that such materials “do nothing to advance a party’s legal case,” Griffin says she suspects that at least some of these materials are AI-generated.
The justice also noted that filings have taken on an increasingly aggressive tone, a trend she also attributes to growing AI use.
Amy Salyzyn, an associate professor at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law, told Canadian Lawyer on Thursday that Griffin’s comments aligned with concerns she’s heard from other adjudicators and judges across Canada, like lengthy, irrelevant, and angry filings.
“I’ve certainly heard from some judges, some tribunal members, that the use of AI is causing a significant new burden on their workload,” Salyzyn says. “Sometimes they’re receiving very lengthy material that, of course, they have an obligation to receive and consider how to deal with. Sometimes they’re receiving a person who may be more combative with them, which is adding to delays and the length of processes.
“I do think that that’s something that is occurring more broadly in Canada – it may not be at the same degree in every court – but certainly in my conversations, I’m hearing that this is a growing concern,” she says.
Alex Mok, a lawyer at Allen / McMillan Litigation Counsel in Vancouver, says he also worries about courts investing more resources into sorting through lengthy or irrelevant filings.
“If you ask any lawyer in BC, especially Vancouver, we will all tell you that the current system is not working perfectly in the sense that every single day we have chambers applications, but we do not have enough judges or associate judges to hear all those applications, which causes delays to dispute resolution,” Mok says.
“That is not just because of AI; that is a combination of various factors,” he adds. “But AI could be one of the factors contributing to the delay or the misuse of judicial resources.”
While it’s understandable that self-represented parties would want to advance every argument at their disposal, the tendency of many AI tools to add meritless claims to their arsenal could tie up court resources that could be better spent on litigants who have “more genuine disputes, more urgent things to deal with,” Mok argues.
There is currently no reliable way to determine how many self-represented litigants are relying on AI across Canada’s courts, largely because it is challenging to confirm when a filing has been prepared with AI definitively. However, some figures help paint a picture. In March, Statistics Canada reported that in 65 percent of family law cases that were active in 2024 and 2025, at least one party reported being self-represented at some point during the case. This spring, the Supreme Court of Canada said that self-represented litigants filed 37 percent of the leave applications it received in 2025.
An intake survey on the website of the National Self-Represented Litigants Project, which provides support to people representing themselves in court, has asked visitors questions about AI use since April 2024. As of June 2026, 51.4 percent of respondents reported using AI tools to help represent themselves in court.
In her decision, Griffin acknowledged that hiring a lawyer is expensive.
But she also warned litigants to be cautious when opting to use AI to prepare their filings instead.
These litigants need “to be aware that it might not help but rather hinder and lead them astray,” Griffin said. “They could end up disappointed and confused, as well as subject to successive costs awards.”
