The chief justice, who retires later this week, said in a recent exclusive interview that an associate judge of the itinerant national trial court sent “a signal” to counsel last June when she imposed a personal costs order on an immigration lawyer who failed to disclose that he used GenAI in preparing his client’s factum — a fact the court detected due to two fake case citations, which the presiding associate judge found were AI-generated.
The Federal Court’s first personal costs sanction was small ($100), Chief Justice Crampton said. “But if we have to increase those cost awards, and even ask [counsel] to show cause why they shouldn’t be held in contempt, we won’t hesitate to do so, because we … can’t have people thumbing their noses at our practice directions.”
Federal Court Chief Justice Paul Crampton
“We’re aware from conferences that we attend, and when people ask for a show of hands [as to] who’s using AI, you get more than half the room putting their hands up,” the chief justice remarked.
Yet so far, very few lawyers have declared that they used GenAI in preparing their court submissions, the chief justice told Law360 Canada.
Chief Justice Crampton stressed that transparency from litigants and lawyers about their GenAI use will help to ensure the integrity of court submissions. “We just have to be vigilant,” he said. “And if we can show the public that we’re being vigilant, then we will maintain public confidence.”
The 67-year-old former competition law lawyer said the aim of the Federal Court’s disclosure requirement that lawyers and litigants specify how they used GenAI in devising their court submissions is “so that the other side would know, and could maybe pay more attention than they might otherwise have paid, to the actual [citations] and any evidence that’s referred to, because AI can create evidence that doesn’t exist. It creates cites that don’t exist, and we just thought it was important that everybody be alerted to where it’s being used.”
The same disclosure requirement applies to AI-generated translations, because those translations may not be accurate, he added.
For its part, the Federal Court has committed to being transparent about its own internal GenAI use.
In late 2023, and then again on Sept. 29, 2025, the court publicly stated that “the court will not use AI, and more specifically automated decision-making tools, in making its judgments and orders, without first engaging in public consultations. For greater certainty, this includes the court’s determination of the issues raised by the parties, as reflected in its reasons for judgment and its reasons for order, or any other decision made by the court in a proceeding” (“Interim Principles and Guidelines on the Court’s Use of Artificial Intelligence”).
Chief Justice Crampton noted that the Federal Court announced that it recently began using GenAI tools “to assist” the human language specialists who translate the court’s judgments, which was flagged by the court in its public notice.
“The AI tools are complementary to the translation — they do not replace the human doing the work,” the court’s notice states. The registry “has implemented a quality control system to ensure that translations accurately reflect the original reasons and outcome.”
Chief Justice Crampton also revealed that the Federal Court is continuing to actively explore how GenAI might assist it with certain “back office” functions, such as the preparation of bench memos by law clerks.
“We’re exploring how clerks might be able to use it to prepare bench memos because, as we are pursuing other initiatives, their workload is increasing, because in the face of a 500 per cent increase in our immigration workload — with a zero increase in our judicial complement or our workforce, … we’ve had to figure out how to avoid falling behind,” Chief Justice Crampton explained.
“And what that means is giving more cases to the same number of judges who were already maxed out and, … as the judges deal with more cases per week, the clerks have to prepare more bench memos,” he said. “Well, they were already maxed out.”
The GenAI initiative for bench memos is only at the exploratory phase, the chief justice noted. “We’re looking at trying to train AI and we’ve done some initial pilots, where we had AI generate memos on specific topics and then have … law clerks generate memos on those same topics and then ask a number of judges to try and identify which one was which,” he said. “And in almost a quarter of the cases, they thought the AI memo was the better one,” he said, adding “that’s a work in progress. They're not yet using AI to draft their memos.”
The chief justice said the Federal Court’s exploration of the potential benefits of GenAI is driven partly by its need to be more efficient.
“I think AI is going to be … a game changer, and we can’t pretend it’s not going to be a game changer,” he observed. “And so we just have to figure out how best to maintain the public’s confidence as we are confronted with greater [AI] use by our stakeholders, and as we start to feel a greater imperative to explore and embrace it ourselves.”
In part, the court’s impetus to explore AI comes from the recent unprecedented surge in immigration judicial reviews, amid the ongoing under-resourcing of the court whereby there are too few judges and staff to handle the high volumes. The court’s registry also struggles with its crumbling legacy IT system, and a backlog of untranslated judgments, which was exacerbated last year by a new statutory obligation to simultaneously release all precedential judgments in both English and French.
Chief Justice Crampton said the court is not yet ready to consult with the bar and public on the court’s possible future use of automated decision-making tools.
“I’ve been very, very leery of … giving the green light to members of the court to start using ChatGPT,” he advised. “We have a consensus within the court that we’re not going to be using AI to write our decisions, and what I mean by that is to create, to draft our decisions,” he observed.
In that regard, the chief justice said he is not referring to judges using spellcheckers or electronic editing tools that may be powered in some way by AI.
“Although if somebody drafted a 30-page initial draft and wanted to feed it through AI in order to reduce it to 15 pages, I would consider that to be potentially something we want to think very carefully about because that starts morphing more into the area of the substantive content of the decision itself,” he said.
“We’ve been holding the line” against using GenAI in the decision-making process, Chief Justice Crampton remarked. “My understanding is courts across the country have been holding the line. But we realize this is a dam that is eventually going to burst, and so we just need to get ready for it.”
To the best of his knowledge as a member of the Canadian Judicial Council, the federal body of 44 chief and associate chief justices who lead the country’s superior trial and appellate courts, “generally the judiciary in this country, certainly my colleagues on council, I think, share this concern that we want to get it right, and we want to study [GenAI] carefully, and not rush ahead without a greater confidence in what we’re doing,” the chief justice said.
“My understanding is no courts are using it, no judges on no courts are using it in Canada, to actually draft decisions,” he said. “But I think it’s fair to say that there probably will be increased pressures over time to use it.” (See: Quebec Superior Court launches AI pilot project.)
Chief Justice Crampton said courts are sharing their experiences with AI. “I think everybody’s looking and trying to stay on top of what everybody else is doing,” he advised. “I think we all recognize that if one court goes out in front too quickly, that could have negative repercussions on public confidence in the administration of justice more generally, and so I think, given that we all recognize that, we’re all proceeding carefully.”
While it’s up to individual courts to decide on what role GenAI tools play in their work, Chief Justice Crampton said he sees a role for chief justices and the leadership in courts to coordinate an approach to GenAI.
“I don’t think it can just be open to every single judge to decide whether he or she is going to use it, because it goes to public confidence in the court as an institution and in the courts collectively,” he explained. “And so I think we have a very strong interest in moving forward as a collectivity.”
Photo of Federal Court Chief Justice Paul Crampton: Balfour
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