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Incident Tracker / United Kingdom

Bandla v Solicitors Regulation Authority, [2025] EWHC 1167 (Admin)

·High Court of England and Wales (King's Bench Division, Administrative Court)·UKCosts order

Before the High Court (Administrative Court), struck-off solicitor Venkateshwarlu Bandla cited around 27 non-existent authorities in his appeal against removal from the roll. Fordham J struck out his grounds as an abuse of process and ordered £24,727.20 in indemnity costs. Bandla denied using AI, attributing the fake citations to unverified Google searches.

Court
High Court of England and Wales (King's Bench Division, Administrative Court)
Date
2025-05-13
Who used the AI
Not recorded
AI tool
Not identified in the record
Conduct
A former solicitor, appearing in person to appeal his removal from the roll, cited a large number of authorities in formal documents before the court; the SRA identified around 27 as non-existent. He denied using AI, attributing the citations to un-verified Google searches.
Outcome
Costs order
Penalty
£24,727.20
Regulatory outcome
Solicitors Regulation Authority: The appellant had already been struck from the roll of solicitors by the SRA; the fabricated-authority conduct arose in his (unsuccessful) High Court appeal against that strike-off decision. (2025-05-13)
Status
Verified against listed sources
Last checked
2026-09-04

What was fabricated or misused

  • R (on the application of Smith) v Parole Board [2005] EWCA Civ 188 — cited for a mental-health extension proposition, but the citation was for different parties and the case did not stand for that proposition
  • Many other authorities in the SRA's 27-item Annex could not be located; the judgment did not enumerate them

What the court said

“This is just the first of some 27 such authorities listed in the SRA’s Annex.”
High Court of England and Wales (King's Bench Division, Administrative Court), [51]
“He accepts that this case, and many other cases which he cited to this Court, do not in fact exist.”
High Court of England and Wales (King's Bench Division, Administrative Court), [52]
“In my judgment, the Court needs to take decisive action to protect the integrity of its processes against any citation of fake authority.”
High Court of England and Wales (King's Bench Division, Administrative Court), [53]
“This, in my judgment, constitutes a set of circumstances in which I should exercise – and so I will exercise – the power of the Court to strike out the grounds of appeal in this case as an abuse of process.”
High Court of England and Wales (King's Bench Division, Administrative Court), [53]

Timeline

  1. Appellant's skeleton argument cited authorities later challenged by the SRA.
  2. SRA skeleton argument annex identified authorities it could not locate.
  3. High Court struck out the grounds of appeal as abuse of process.
  4. Court ordered indemnity costs summarily assessed at £24,727.20.

Why this case matters

Bandla tests the same verification duty outside a conventional lawyer-client filing. The appellant appeared in person, but he was a former solicitor and used formal appeal documents to maintain fake authorities after the regulator had served its Annex. Unlike MS Bangladesh, the court did not find ChatGPT use; the abuse finding rested on citation of non-existent cases and failure to check. The indemnity costs order also ties the fake-authority conduct directly to the price of the appeal, not only to professional discipline.

Practice note

A party who cites cases in an appeal should be able to produce the judgment and show that it supports the stated proposition. Google search snippets or summaries are not enough. When an opposing party identifies authorities that cannot be found, the response should be to check, withdraw and explain, not to keep relying on them at the hearing.

Primary sources for this incident

Related regulation records for this incident

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Cite this record

SafeLegalAI Global Legal AI Incident Tracker, “Bandla v Solicitors Regulation Authority, [2025] EWHC 1167 (Admin)”, safelegalai.com/tracker/bandla-v-sra (accessed 2026-09-16). Data: CC BY 4.0.

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