When Spain’s General Council of Lawyers presented its white paper on AI in January, its president, Salvador González, said 60% of the profession already uses AI-enabled applications. The council’s survey also found that only 8% of lawyers claim in-depth knowledge of how these programs work, while about half describe their knowledge as low. In France, AI proficiency tops the list of training needs, named by 90% of respondents.
Within a fortnight, a Spanish court showed what that gap looks like in practice.
A €420 lesson
The appeal before the Criminal Chamber of the High Court of Justice of the Canary Islands cited up to 48 Supreme Court judgments and a report by Spain’s judicial council. The court’s own documentation service found that none of them existed.
The lawyer had used a general-purpose AI tool and never checked the case numbers, dates or identifiers against Spain’s free public case-law database. The court called it “a breach of the basic duty of human supervision”. Because he admitted the facts, it fined him €420, pointedly set at about half the annual cost of a legal-specific AI tool, and referred the matter to his bar association.
A small fine. A very public lesson.
Everyone is using it
Spain is not an outlier. Wherever Europe’s bars and researchers have asked, the answer has come back the same way.
Italy’s lawyers doubled their use of AI in a single year, from 27.5% to 55.3%, according to the 2026 report by the pension fund Cassa Forense and the research institute Censis, drawn from more than 30,000 questionnaires. Among lawyers under 40 it is 70.3%. In France, 93% of the 4,740 lawyers who answered the national bar council’s 2026 barometer use AI at work, and 70% use it at least several times a week. Germany’s Legal Tech Monitor 2026 found 73% of respondents had a general-purpose AI tool and 61% had licensed a legal one. In Poland, a survey of 507 lawyers by the recruitment firm Supesu put usage at about 88%.
The surveys ask different questions, and the French figure rests on a 6% response rate that likely flatters the enthusiasts. Still, no country in the set points the other way.
Policies don’t check citations. People do
If the problem were only individual lawyers cutting corners, firms could fix it with a memo. This year proved otherwise.
In April, Sullivan & Cromwell, one of Wall Street’s most prestigious firms, apologised to Martin Glenn, chief judge of the US Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan, after AI-generated errors made their way into a filing in the Prince Group case, as Reuters reported. The firm told the court it had comprehensive policies and training requirements governing AI. They weren’t followed, and its second-level review didn’t catch the errors either.
Weeks later, London. A junior associate at Pinsent Masons used an AI tool to research an insolvency point, and a letter went to the court quoting wording from an insolvency rule that the rule does not contain. The judge publicly admonished the firm and found that a partner and a senior associate had failed to supervise the work. Pinsent Masons referred itself to the Solicitors Regulation Authority, which has since disclosed 42 reports of potential AI misuse in a single year.
Rules existed. What broke down was the checking.
The law has already moved
Europe has not left this to good intentions. Since February 2025, Article 4 of the EU AI Act has obliged organisations that deploy AI to act on their staff’s AI literacy. The European Commission tried to downgrade that duty to mere encouragement this year. Parliament pushed back, and the version in force since July still requires firms to take measures to support AI literacy, even if it no longer demands a guaranteed level. National authorities began supervising it in August.
The industry’s own conferences have arrived at the same place. At Legalweek in New York, the CLOC Global Institute in Chicago and LegalTechTalk in London, the debate this year shifted from whether to use AI to who reviews its output, who answers for it and how people are trained. Oyango Snell, president and chief executive of CLOC, said teams are now sharing “what has worked, what broke, and how they are governing it”.
Clients are watching
Corporate legal departments have noticed. In the German monitor, nearly 40% of in-house lawyers said they already ask outside counsel for evidence of how they use legal technology or AI. And 73% would consolidate work with firms that can demonstrably cut costs with it.
That turns a compliance headache into a commercial question. For Europe’s law firms, using AI is now the baseline. The firms that pull ahead will be the ones that can show a client, a court or a regulator exactly who checked the output and how those people were trained.
The rest may find out where they stand the way the lawyer in the Canary Islands did. In writing, from a judge.
Sources
- Consejo General de la Abogacía Española, presentation of the white paper on AI and the legal profession, 29 January 2026 – abogacia.es/actualidad/noticias/salvador-gonzalez-si-queremos-ser-la-abogacia-tecnologica-que-la-sociedad-necesita-no-puede-haber-brechas-nadie-debe-quedarse-atras/
- Consejo General del Poder Judicial, “El TSJ de Canarias multa a un abogado por citar hasta 48 sentencias falsas sugeridas por IA”, 13 February 2026 – poderjudicial.es/cgpj/es/Poder-Judicial/Sala-de-Prensa/Archivo-de-notas-de-prensa/El-TSJ-de-Canarias-multa-a-un-abogado-por-citar-hasta-48-sentencias-falsas-sugeridas-por-IA
- Cassa Forense and Censis, Rapporto sull’Avvocatura 2026 – censis.it/x-rapporto-sullavvocatura-2026/rapporto-avvocatura-2026-2/
- Conseil national des barreaux and Ifop, Baromètre « État de la profession » 2026, quantitative results – cnb.avocat.fr/medias/ifop—quanti-rapport-de-resultats—barometre-etat-de-la-profession-170626-6acce48da631b0.27759474.pdf
- Legal Tech Verband Deutschland, Legal Tech Monitor 2026, presented at Legal Tech Day, September 2026
- Supesu Recruitment, survey of 507 lawyers in Poland, January–March 2026
- Reuters, Sullivan & Cromwell apology to the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, April 2026
- Cork and another v Smith [2026] EWHC 1199, High Court of England and Wales; case note by Nelsons Solicitors – nelsonslaw.co.uk/ai-hallucinations-legal-practice-cork-smith/
- Solicitors Regulation Authority, warning notice “Misuse of AI”, 17 August 2026 – sra.org.uk/solicitors/guidance/misuse-ai/
- Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 (Digital Omnibus on AI), amending Article 4 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689; client alert by Cuatrecasas – cuatrecasas.com/en/spain/intellectual-property/art/digital-omnibus-ai-has-been-published
- CLOC, 2026 Global Institute press release, May 2026 – cloc.org/newsdesk/2026-cloc-global-institute-brings-more-than-2300/
