AI hallucinations must be controlled by lawyers before submitting pleadings to a court
CoA California., 15 December 2025, No. D086055
CAA Bordeaux (interim measures)., 26 February 2026, No.° 25BX02906
TJ Périgueux., 18 December 2025, No. 25/00509
Despite the widely publicized examples of surprising—if not absurd—answers produced by several generative artificial intelligence platforms available to the general public, concrete instances of hallucinations that raise problems for professional expertise are multiplying, including in the legal field, which is nevertheless subject to strict requirements regarding source verification.
Worldwide, several hundred cases have already been identified in which courts were asked to rule on disputes involving erroneous citations of legal scholarship or prior judicial decisions, with a majority documented in the United States.
Articles
TJ Paris., 6 February 2026, No. 24/01488
A ruling handed down on 6 February 2026 by the Paris Court of first instance, in a dispute between the former director of a company sold to a third party and the assignee, addressed a very common practical question in day‑to‑day business: may a director (or shareholder) file in their own name a trademark intended to be used by the company?
French bill submitted to the Parliament on the resilience of critical infrastructure and the strengthening of cybersecurity
EU Commission Press release: Commission strengthens EU cybersecurity resilience and capabilities
While Member States were required to transpose the NIS2 Directive no later than 17 October 2024, the draft law on the resilience of critical infrastructure and the strengthening of cybersecurity — originally tabled before the Senate on 15 October 2024 and subsequently examined by the National Assembly — remains stalled. Although a revised version was published on 10 September 2025 by a special committee, the parliamentary process has been delayed due to political debates surrounding the appropriateness of an amendment (current Article 16 bis) aimed at prohibiting the introduction of “backdoors” by the State into electronic messaging platforms, which could be exploited by malicious actors.
French Cour de cassation, Commercial Chamber., 3 December 2025, No. 24-12.462
A trend toward greater methodological rigour appears to be taking shape both in the case law of the French Cour de cassation and in that of the Unified Patent Court when assessing patent validity criteria, particularly novelty and inventive step. Whereas earlier case law sometimes overlooked the need to precisely define the “person skilled in the art,” their skills and their common general knowledge, the Cour de cassation and the newly established court competent for unitary European patents now encourage parties and lower courts to begin by clearly identifying this notional person before analyzing the technology and the prior art.
WIPO (UDRP)., 21 January 2026, No. D2025-5015
WIPO (UDRP)., 26 December 2025, No. D2025-4435
WIPO (UDRP)., 24 November 2025, No. D2025-4072
The phenomenon known and documented since the early 2000s as “cybersquatting” consists of an illegitimate third party registering a domain name made up of terms used by an intellectual property rights holder — most commonly a trademark — without any genuine intention of using it for legitimate market purposes, but rather to hinder the rightful owner in bad faith or to monetize the resale of the domain name.
Paris Court of appeal., 6 February 2026, No. 24/12625
The Comité des Champs‑Élysées, an association responsible for promoting and enhancing the image of the Parisian avenue and its businesses, organizes annual Christmas lighting displays. It accused a well‑known chocolate manufacturer of reusing images reproducing its “Scintillance” lighting campaign (held in 2014 and 2017) in audiovisual advertisements.
Paris Court of appeal., 18 December 2025, No. 25/04270
French Cour de cassation, Labor Chamber., 18 June 2025, No. 23-19.022
CJEU., 4 May 2023, No. C‑487/21
Employee–employer disputes arising from dismissals increasingly involve requests based on the employee’s right of access to personal data processed by the employer, as provided for in Article 15 of the GDPR. The purpose of such a request is, in principle, to enable the data subject to verify the lawfulness of the processing in light of the principles set out in the Regulation (for example, data minimization or documentation of processing purposes), as recalled in Recital 63 of the GDPR.
EUIPO., 5 February 2026, No. I 125 597
Although the notion of “prior art” is common to all areas of intellectual property, it is particularly complex to assess in copyright and design law, given the difficulty of systematically proving with certainty that a work, object or publication was made available to the public on a specific date. While a registered industrial property right has a certain and verifiable date of disclosure, the same cannot be said of a creation that, although completed, may only have been shown to a limited number of individuals or published on a website with an uncertain history.
