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The sanctions record · Supreme Court of British Columbia, 2024

Zhang v. Chen

2024 BCSC 285, Docket E202085, Vancouver Registry · ruling on costs of Masuhara J · 20 February 2024, cover page corrected 23 February 2024

Page verified 5 August 2026. Quotations are from the court’s own corrected reasons, linked below.

The most carefully reasoned decision on this record, and the one most often described wrongly. The court refused special costs, because special costs require reprehensible conduct and it found none. It then ordered costs personally against counsel under a different rule that has no bad-faith requirement, and added an order nobody else has made: go back through every one of your other files.

The timeline

  • 2023–2024Mr Chen applies for parenting time in China with three children who live with their mother in North Vancouver. His counsel, Ms Chong Ke, files a notice of application relying on two cases.
  • DiscoveryOpposing counsel cannot locate the cases and asks for copies. It emerges that the cases do not exist and were produced by ChatGPT.
  • DelayThe court records that when Ms Ke first discovered the true nature of the cases, she did not convey it to opposing counsel.
  • Jan–Feb 2024The costs application is heard over five days: 12, 15, 23 and 31 January and 2 February 2024. Ms Ke is separately represented.
  • 20 Feb 2024Masuhara J delivers the ruling on costs.

What the AI did

“Ms. Ke was using a generative AI tool not fit for her purposes.”

The judgment goes further than most in explaining why, citing empirical work rather than intuition:

“The study found that legal hallucinations are alarmingly prevalent, occurring between 69% of the time with ChatGPT 3.5 and 88% with Llama 2 … these findings caution against the rapid and unsupervised integration of popular LLMs into legal tasks.”

The reference is to Dahl et al., “Large Legal Fictions: Profiling Legal Hallucinations in Large Language Models” (2024), arXiv:2401.01301. A judge reading a preprint into reasons in February 2024 is the earliest instance of that on this record.

What the court did, and why

This is the distinction that gets lost in the reporting. Special costs were dismissed. Special costs against a lawyer require a serious abuse of the judicial system, or dishonest or malicious conduct that is deliberate; a mistake, an error of judgment, or even negligence does not reach it. The court instead used Supreme Court Family Rule 16-1(30):

“There is no requirement under this rule for reprehensible conduct or abuse of process, as would be required for special costs under the Rules or the inherent jurisdiction of the court. The authority under R. 16-1(30) is discretionary; however, it is to be exercised with restraint and sparingly.”
  • Personal costsUnder R. 16-1(30)(c) and (d), “[a]dditional effort and expense were incurred because of Ms. Ke’s insertion of the fake cases. This additional effort and expense is to be borne personally by Ms. Ke.” Allowed for four half-days, to be reviewed by the Registrar under Appendix B.
  • File review“Ms. Ke is also to review all of her files that are before this court” for any citations or summaries obtained from ChatGPT or other generative AI tools, to notify the parties and the court immediately if any are found, and otherwise to report within thirty days.
  • ProspectiveThe court said it would be prudent for her, going forward, to tell the court and opposing parties when materials include AI-generated content.
“As this case has unfortunately made clear, generative AI is still no substitute for the professional expertise that the justice system requires of lawyers. Competence in the selection and use of any technology tools, including those powered by AI, is critical. The integrity of the justice system requires no less.”

What it changed

Three contributions. It separated fault from bad faith, which is why it can be cited by a lawyer arguing against the harshest remedy and by a court imposing a real one. It produced the file-wide review order, a remedy that reaches every other matter the lawyer is running and that no American court on this record has yet copied. And it identified the aggravating act precisely: not the fabrication, but the gap between discovering it and telling the other side.

The lesson for the next filing

The order that hurt was the file review, because it asked a question about work already delivered and gave thirty days to answer it. A firm that seals a record at the time of each filing can answer that order in an afternoon; a firm that does not has to re-open every file.

Generate the certification →  ·  Read your judge’s AI order →

Sources

Related

Checked 5 August 2026 against the court’s own corrected reasons. Information, not legal advice, and not advice on the law of British Columbia.

Information, not legal advice. Every entry is verified against the court’s own document or contemporaneous reporting; where a source is reporting rather than the document, we say so.