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| Howsikan Kugathasan |
In the past year, courts have caught lawyers using AI for citing case law that’s unrelated or plainly nonexistent (R. v. Chand, [2025] O.J. No. 2288, Ko v. Li, 2025 ONSC 2965). While it’s natural to err on the side of caution about using AI as a lawyer, to avoid having your decisions published (for all the wrong reasons), or worse, a law society complaint, here are three things to keep in mind to make AI valuable in your criminal practice.
Learn not to trust AI
The first thing my computer science professor told me when teaching our class to code was that “computers are dumb, computers are dumb, computers are dumb.” The fact that computers are ostensibly more intelligent doesn’t mean that this maxim goes away.
Remember, the AI is often trained on data that isn’t up to date. AI models are only trained on data up to a
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In fact, you should test that idea out. On a programming podcast, Simon Willison tells programmers to try to trick the AI chatbot.
Even more so, the AI does what you tell it. Try to get your AI chatbot to tell you that the Jordan time limit is 40 months, or that judges can never jump to a joint position guilty plea (R. v. Jordan, [2016] 1 S.C.R. 631). Coax it and make it believe you’re right. The AI will validate your incorrect beliefs. Once you’re comfortable with AI getting things wrong, you’ll have the right mindset, namely that you can use it to shepherd your work along, but with a degree of skepticism, like you would with an articling student.
Use AI for the easy stuff
If you use the analogy of AI as an articling student, it’ll help you think about what you can use AI for. Would you let an articling student prepare your cross-examination of an expert for your homicide trial? Probably not. Then what would you let your articling student do? Write submissions for your joint position guilty plea perhaps, or questions and submissions for your contested, but straightforward, bail hearing.
Again, while AI won’t be offloading the challenging mental work of writing your factums and building your casebooks, most criminal defence work isn’t that anyway. It’s the routine but important tasks of guilty pleas, bail hearings and emails to the Crown to negotiate files. If you get AI to do the easier, straightforward work, then it frees up time for you to work on the stuff that really needs your attention.
Remember that AI is not there to replace you
If the most important mindset shift with AI is that it’s dumb, then the second most important thing to keep in mind is that AI is a supplement, not a substitute, to you, the lawyer.
You’re the lawyer. You have the experience of law school, articling and being called to the bar. You know how certain prosecutors negotiate and which arguments the judges in your jurisdiction value.
When Zoom court came along during COVID-19, it didn’t replace the need to make adjournments, it just facilitated it. If you look at it that way, AI is there to make you better, not to take you out of the picture entirely.
When Peter Thiel founded PayPal, he noted that their fraud detection algorithms were too cautious and would detect instances of fraud when there weren’t any. To fix this, he coupled his software with humans who made the final call on whether fraud occurred. Your approach with AI should be the same. It’s not either AI or the human lawyer, it’s AI and the human lawyer. They work best in tandem, especially when you treat AI as your slightly untrustworthy articling student.
Overall, AI can be an efficient ally in criminal defence, but only when used with caution, skepticism and sound legal judgment.
Howsikan Kugathasan is a newly called criminal defence lawyer in Ontario with Lakinafolabi Law Professional Corporation. When not in court or writing factums, he's writing Python and thinking about ways he can use technology to make the practice of law easier for himself and others.
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