As artificial intelligence technologies permeate every facet of modern life, fabricated case law is becoming a systemic challenge for the Canadian legal system.
Since 2024, Canadian courts and tribunals have flagged more than 200 non-existent cases in parties’ legal submissions across over 100 decisions, and a new study from legaltech startup Courtready finds that AI was a culprit in a majority of them.
Courtready, a legal tech company that helps Canadians navigate the legal system with practical tools and educational courses, is on a mission to make the legal system easier to navigate.
“Access to justice is a serious issue in Canada,” commented cofounder Tom Macintosh Zheng in a recent interview with LegalTech.ca. “With Courtready, we’re trying to make the system easier to navigate and help people move their cases forward more efficiently.”
His company’s recent research found that decisions flagging non-existent cases have risen significantly, from just seven identified in 2024 to 80 in 2025, with 2026 being on track for the most ever.
To address the problem, Zheng says Courtready has developed CaseCheck, a Canadian legal citation verification tool designed to flag fictitious citations before they reach the court.
“For every non-existent decision flagged by a court, there may be others that were never detected,” Zheng notes. “This is likely the tip of the iceberg.”
Through the tool, users can upload a list of authorities in PDF format. From there, CaseCheck extracts every case citation and cross-references each one against Canadian case law to quickly spot what’s real and what’s not.
“That’s exactly why we built CaseCheck,” Zheng stated, “so that lawyers, litigants, and courts have a way to verify citations before fake cases become real law in Canada.”
Courtready’s kit of tools fall into three categories, according to Zheng. There are calculators that apply legal rules to generate clear outputs (like deadlines and interest), as well as guided decision tools that walk users through legal tests (like flight delay compensation eligibility or how to enforce Small Claims Court judgments). There are also monitoring dashboards that track availability, like Court Dates Finder.
More than 11,000 Canadians currently use Courtready, which launched in Ontario in 2025 with plans to expand nationwide by 2027.