The words “It does work! This is feasible!” appeared in a New Zealand legal disciplinary decision concerning a lawyer accused of misleading her client about litigation strategy. The Legal Complaints Review Officer referred to them when examining the advice the lawyer had given. He ultimately found that the client had been misled and made findings of unsatisfactory conduct against the lawyer.

There is something particularly interesting about those words, though. They were not originally written in English. They appeared in a translation of chat messages that the client said had been produced using ChatGPT. The Review Officer knew this. He expressly recorded it in his decision. But how did he establish that the English accurately reflected what the lawyer had written in the original language?

That is the question I find most interesting about VA v JL [2025] NZLCRO 123.

A dispute about what the lawyer said

The case arose from a complaint about the handling of an employment and commercial dispute. The client maintained that her lawyer had advised her that High Court proceedings could be used to stop or disrupt proceedings before the Employment Relations Authority. An important part of the evidence consisted of chat messages exchanged between the client and the lawyer on 23 July 2021. Both parties produced records of the exchange, but the records differed. The client’s version contained messages in a language anonymised in the decision as Language F, accompanied by English translations she said ChatGPT had produced. The lawyer supplied a shorter version, with what the Review Officer believed were her own translations. Crucially, the client’s version included substantive advice that did not appear in the lawyer’s record. The lawyer denied sending the relevant message.

Which record was more complete?

At paragraph [112], the Review Officer explained why he preferred the client’s record. He considered her records otherwise meticulous, thought deletion of messages more likely than fabrication, and noted that some messages in the lawyer’s version appeared to be replies to missing communications. On the balance of probabilities, he found the client’s record more complete. But that finding did not establish that its English translation was accurate.

Two different evidential questions

For me, this is the central problem with the way the translated evidence was handled. The Review Officer had two questions to consider. The first was which party had supplied the more complete account of the correspondence. The second was what the original-language messages actually meant. Those are not the same question. It is entirely possible for a chat record to be authentic and complete, yet for its English translation to be inaccurate. A translation might omit a qualification, introduce a degree of certainty absent from the original, or convey the general sense while altering an important distinction.

In this case, the Review Officer offered reasons for preferring one record over the other. But the published decision does not explain how he established that the ChatGPT-generated English accurately represented the underlying messages. There is no identified independent translation, no discussion of linguistic verification and no indication that the Review Officer was himself able to understand Language F. Perhaps the translation had been checked. Perhaps there was some other basis for treating it as reliable. The decision does not tell us.

There is also a more subtle difficulty with the reasoning in paragraph [112]. One reason the Review Officer gave for preferring the client’s record was that some of the messages were not what the client would have wanted to hear. But how could he assess what the messages would have meant to the client without first establishing what they actually said? That assessment appears to depend, at least in part, on the meaning conveyed by the English translation. In other words, the translated content was being used to help assess the reliability of the record, without an explanation of how the translation itself had been verified.

I find that an uncomfortable evidential gap.

Why the precise wording mattered

This was not simply a case where an AI translation was included among the documents and then largely ignored. At paragraph [208], the Review Officer expressly returned to the July correspondence. He attributed to the lawyer the statements “Yes, it will work” and “It does work! This is feasible!” He considered those statements when assessing whether the lawyer had allowed her client to believe that commencing High Court proceedings would achieve a particular procedural result. At paragraph [209], he included the July exchange among the evidence concerning the advice the client had received.

The precise meaning of those words matters.

There is a difference between telling a client that a particular course of action is legally possible and assuring the client that it will achieve the desired outcome. There may also be important distinctions between expressing confidence, identifying a possibility and giving a qualified opinion about litigation strategy. Those distinctions can be conveyed differently in different languages. They can also be altered in translation. I am not suggesting that ChatGPT necessarily mistranslated the lawyer’s message. We have no basis for concluding that it did. But equally, the English wording cannot establish its own accuracy. The Review Officer did acknowledge that the disputed message included a warning about the costs and stress of pursuing proceedings. He did not treat it as an unqualified recommendation to litigate. Nevertheless, he relied on its translated content when assessing the advice given.

If the meaning of a disputed communication contributes to a finding about a lawyer’s professional conduct, surely the reliability of the translation deserves some attention.

The Review Officer recognised translation difficulties elsewhere

There is another aspect of the decision I find revealing. At paragraph [106], the Review Officer expressly acknowledged that he did not have English translations of certain earlier messages from the client. He therefore discussed the lawyer’s replies, which were in English. At paragraph [114], dealing with a separate instruction, he described an expression as an inexact translation and interpreted the client’s instructions in their wider context. So translation difficulties were not entirely absent from his reasoning. Yet when it came to the disputed ChatGPT-translated exchange, there is no corresponding explanation of how the accuracy of the English wording was established. The distinction is important. Recognising that a translation exists, or recognising that another translation may be inexact, is not the same as verifying the meaning of the original-language evidence.

Does this call the disciplinary outcome into question? There is an important qualification to this criticism. The Review Officer did not rely exclusively on the ChatGPT-translated messages. His findings were based on a substantial body of evidence, including written legal advice, the conduct of the proceedings and a later translated conversation supplied by the lawyer herself. It would therefore be wrong to suggest that the entire disciplinary outcome depended on the accuracy of one ChatGPT translation. We cannot know whether an independently verified translation would have affected any of the findings. Nor does the decision establish that the ChatGPT translation was inaccurate.

My concern is narrower, but I think it is important. The Review Officer expressly relied on statements appearing in a translation when deciding what advice a lawyer had given. Yet his published reasons do not explain how the accuracy of that translation was established. That is a problem with the transparency of the evidential reasoning, irrespective of whether the ultimate findings were justified by other evidence.

Who checks the evidence when the decision-maker cannot read the original?

In my recent discussion of AA v Secretary of State for the Home Department, I examined a case in which a judge noticed an obvious indication of ChatGPT use in a witness letter that the solicitors had apparently overlooked. That case raised questions about lawyers’ responsibility for checking AI-assisted evidence before submitting it to a court. VA v JL raises a different question. Here, the decision-maker was expressly aware that ChatGPT had been used to translate the evidence. The problem was not detecting AI involvement. It was establishing the reliability of the translated material before relying on its meaning.

Of course, courts and other legal decision-makers routinely deal with evidence written in languages they do not understand. They must be able to rely on translations. I am not suggesting that every translated document requires an independent expert assessment, or that the mere involvement of ChatGPT automatically renders a translation unreliable. But where the content of a communication is disputed, the parties offer different records, and the meaning attributed to particular words contributes to findings of professional misconduct, the method by which that meaning is established deserves scrutiny.

The mere fact that a translation reads fluently in English does not establish that it accurately communicates the source. Nor does preferring one party’s documentary record establish the accuracy of that party’s translation. In AA, the question was why the lawyers failed to notice what the judge noticed. In VA v JL, the question is what the Review Officer did with the knowledge that he was relying on an AI-generated translation.

If a decision-maker relies on translated words to determine what a lawyer said, shouldn’t the decision explain how the meaning of those words was verified? That seems to me a reasonable question to ask when translated evidence becomes part of the basis for a finding of professional misconduct.

#LegalTranslation #AIandLaw #Evidence #LegalTech #ProfessionalResponsibility