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South Africa's regulator vacuum: courts doing the LPC's job on AI

South Africa's Legal Practice Council has published no guidance on lawyers' AI use — so its courts are referring practitioners to it instead, case by case.

Daman Kaur

South Africa has one of Africa’s busiest records of AI-fabricated citations, and no regulatory guidance to govern it. As of mid-2026, the Legal Practice Council — the statutory regulator of the country’s legal profession — has published no binding guidance, notice, or advisory on lawyers’ use of generative AI. Into that gap, the courts have stepped: judges are referring practitioners to the LPC case by case, doing the standard-setting the regulator has not.

What the regulator has not done

The LPC’s own notices-and-advisories page lists notices on registration, risk and compliance returns, and similar administrative matters, but nothing on AI. The Legal Practitioners’ Code of Conduct does not address AI use. The LPC has an AI policy reportedly in drafting and held an internal webinar in August 2025, but a policy-in-progress and a staff webinar are not published rules a practitioner can be held to. The ex-ante guidance simply does not exist.

What the courts are doing instead

Two High Court judgments show the pattern. In Mavundla v MEC (KZN) [2025] ZAKZPHC 2, a candidate attorney’s papers cited non-existent ChatGPT-generated cases; the court called the conduct “irresponsible and downright unprofessional,” made a costs order, and directed the registrar to send the judgment to the LPC. In Northbound Processing [2025] ZAGPJHC 661, counsel relied on a subscription tool that produced fictitious citations, and the court referred the legal team to the LPC for investigation, invoking the judicial duty to report serious misconduct.

These referrals are enforcement without a rulebook. The judges are pushing accountability to the LPC precisely because the LPC has issued no standard of its own.

The gap the profession is trying to fill

The nearest thing to guidance is non-binding: “Ethics Guidelines for Legal Practitioners in South Africa on the Use of Generative AI,” an initiative circulated through the Law Society of South Africa and De Rebus (a 2024 draft, revised in 2025). Its core principle is the familiar one — practitioners remain fully responsible, and every citation must be confirmed from a primary source. But it is a professional-body proposal, not an LPC instrument, and it binds no one.

The result is a jurisdiction where the duty is clear from the case law and absent from the regulator. Until the LPC publishes, South African practitioners are governed on AI by judgments after the fact, not guidance before it.

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