Ruling refers to notice calling for caution when using LLMs for court submissions
In a case involving parenting and child support issues, the Alberta Court of Appeal awarded a relatively modest amount of costs against a mother who used artificial intelligence (AI)-generated authorities in her factum, given the circumstances.
However, the appeal court stated that self-represented litigants such as the mother could expect more substantial penalties in future cases if they failed to comply with the Alberta courts’ notice regarding the use of large language models (LLMs).
In DJ v SN, 2025 ABCA 383, the parties married in July 2000 and separated in November 2018. They had two children – a son aged 17 and a daughter aged seven – at the time of a December 2024 hearing.
A 2019 consent parenting order initially granted the mother primary parenting over both children. In March 2022, the son voluntarily chose to reside equally with both parents in a 50/50 week-on/week-off shared parenting arrangement.
In 2023, the father applied to vary the 2019 consent order to formalize the son’s current parenting arrangement and to vary the daughter’s arrangement to align with her brother’s shared parenting schedule.
In 2024, the father requested a retroactive decrease of his child support obligations to reflect his son’s actual parenting arrangement. The father also sought to impute income to the mother, who was supposedly underemployed or unemployed. He alleged that she had insufficiently disclosed her financial information.
Last Apr. 7, Justice Derek Jugnauth of the Court of King’s Bench of Alberta granted orders varying parenting and child support, as well as imposing a week-on/week-off shared parenting schedule for the parties’ two children.
The mother appealed the orders. She referred to three nonexistent authorities in her factum. At the appeal hearing, where both parties were self-represented, the mother acknowledged that AI tools had generated those authorities.
Costs weigh on AI use
The Court of Appeal of Alberta dismissed the appeal and the fresh evidence application. The appeal court ordered the mother to pay the father’s appeal costs under column 1, plus $500 in costs due to her use of AI-generated authorities.
The appeal court noted that the Alberta courts’ notice to the public and legal profession dated Oct. 6, 2023 – titled “Ensuring the Integrity of Court Submissions when Using Large Language Models”-- called for legal practitioners, parties, and self-represented litigants to:
- Be cautious when referring to legal authorities or analyses derived from LLMs in submissions
- Rely exclusively on authoritative sources – including official court websites, commonly referenced commercial publishers, or well-established public services like CanLII – when referring to case law, statutes, or commentary in representations to the courts
According to the appeal court, the governing panel or individual judge had the discretion to set proportionate and meaningful sanctions as a consequence for a party failing to adhere to the October 2023 notice.
Next, the appeal court ruled that the mother’s proposed fresh evidence did not meet the applicable test in Palmer v The Queen, 1979 CanLII 8 (SCC), [1980] 1 SCR 759.
Apart from a bill of costs and the parties’ emails, the appeal court pointed out that the mother could have presented all the proposed evidence during the hearing of the special chambers application in December 2024.
The appeal court stated that it could not reasonably expect additional evidence concerning a July 2017 incident to affect the result, given that the chambers justice accepted the mother’s evidence about that incident, while the father also admitted to it.
The appeal court added that it could not reasonably expect other photos, videos, dentist’s notes, doctor’s notes, the bill of costs, or the email excerpts to alter the outcome. The appeal court decided to defer to the chambers justice’s credibility assessment.
Lastly, the appeal court held that the chambers justice reasonably exercised his discretion and correctly applied the relevant law to the parenting and support issues asserted in the father’s application.
The appeal court saw no reviewable error in the chambers justice’s decision to limit the evidence that he would consider to what the parties had filed in line with the Alberta Rules of Court, Alta Reg 124/2010.
The appeal court said it could expect the mother, who had been participating in domestic litigation with the father for over five years and had previously retained three counsel, to follow the rules.
