MacLean, who fought Canada’s first case of AI-hallucinated case law last year, reflects on his work
In December 2023, Fraser MacLean was working on a family law matter when he received a filing from opposing counsel. The dispute involved a separated couple, and the father had applied for a court order to allow the couple’s three children to travel from BC to China for the holidays. MacLean’s client, the children’s mother, opposed the visit. As MacLean reviewed the filing in court that day, he began to brace himself – it would be a tough case to beat.
The challenge stemmed largely from case law that the other side had cited – two decisions by the Supreme Court of British Columbia that found it was in the best interests of a child to travel with a parent to visit family overseas. In both cases, the court found that travelling would maintain or enhance the child’s cultural development. Each hewed so closely to MacLean’s case that it was hard to imagine the same court ruling differently.
MacLean and his team at MacLean Family Law prepared their response in the following days. They couldn’t find the two cases, but MacLean was initially unfazed: it wasn’t uncommon for court filings to contain minor citation errors. The team punched search terms from the case names and descriptions into legal databases like CanLII, Westlaw, and Quicklaw, and contacted opposing counsel for more information. However, no results turned up, and the other side didn’t respond.
As MacLean’s suspicions grew, opposing counsel suddenly told his team they would no longer rely on the two cases. In their response to the court, MacLean’s team decided to cite a case in New York involving Avianca, in which a lawyer suing the airline cited more than half a dozen court decisions that ChatGPT had hallucinated. The day before the hearing, MacLean was informed by opposing counsel that the two cases he hadn’t been able to find had also been hallucinated by the generative AI tool. The cases didn’t exist.
MacLean was stunned. The hallucinated case citations did not look fake or rely on ambiguities; they looked “100 percent real,” MacLean says. The case, Zhang v. Chen, became the first known case involving AI-hallucinated case law in Canada.
The legal community’s response was swift. The Law Society of BC opened an investigation into Chong Ke, the lawyer responsible for the hallucinated cases. In the months that followed, multiple courts – including the Supreme Court of Yukon, the Court of King's Bench of Manitoba, the Provincial Court of Nova Scotia, and the Federal Court – issued directives requiring parties to disclose when generative AI tools are used to prepare court filings. Multiple law societies released guidelines for lawyers on how to use generative AI tools responsibly.
As for Zhang v. Chen, the ordeal shot MacLean to fame as it garnered widespread news coverage. It taught MacLean to approach generative AI tools with caution as a lawyer – a lesson he says was most eloquently summarized by Justice David Masuhara, who presided over the travel dispute and wrote in his decision that “generative AI is still no substitute for the professional expertise that the justice system requires of lawyers.” But perhaps most important to Maclean, his team ultimately secured a win for their client. After all, wanting to help people was why he went into law in the first place.
MacLean grew up in Richmond, BC, where two circumstances would shape his future career. The first was that he was always surrounded by lawyers, including his father and MacLean Family Law founder Lorne MacLean; other role models included Former BC Provincial Court and the BC Supreme Court judge Keith Bracken, currently a lawyer at the MacLean firm, and the late Doug Eastwood, who spent nearly three decades with the BC Ministry of Attorney General and wrote a reference letter for MacLean when he applied to law school.
The second was that he was an athlete. “I was very active in the community and sports from a young age – I played high-level competitive hockey growing up,” MacLean says. “A lot of things I learned from the competitive sports I grew up playing have given me some skills that I've been able to transfer over into my legal career, such as working in teams, teamwork, discipline, determination, and leadership.”
Recounting his career to Canadian Lawyer, MacLean repeatedly namechecks mentors, other lawyers, and paralegals – framing them as teammates in the effort to help clients navigate complex family matters. At Thompson Rivers University, where he studied law, MacLean decided to channel his instinct for collaboration and ambition to serve others toward family disputes.
“I remember learning in law school that going through a divorce or separation is one of the most stressful events, along with the death of a family member,” MacLean says. “Knowing I could help people going through some of the most challenging times of their life, that really appealed to me.”
Working on family matters can be taxing. Having practised in the field for nearly eight years, MacLean frames the job as one where “you’re always on the clock,” describing some cases as “roller coasters” and scenarios where clients have called at night upon discovering police officers at their door. “It could be an emotionally charged time for the client, and they're going through a difficult time,” MacLean says. “So, you’ve really got to be a pillar for them and someone they can lean on.”
MacLean says it is rewarding to see the tangible impact his work has made on his clients’ lives. In the spring of 2024, however, MacLean received another type of affirmation when he, along with two other lawyers at MacLean Family Law, accepted on behalf of the firm the LEAP Legal Software Award for Family Law Firm of the Year at the Canadian Law Awards. The award was a career highlight, MacLean says.
“Just being on that stage there in Toronto, accepting the award, knowing all the hard work and sacrifice everyone's put in,” he says. “People stay late, away from their families, working late to prepare these cases.
“I know on a lot of these cases, only one name goes on it – sometimes it's mine,” he says. “But it takes… your entire team to get the results you do.”
Nominations are open until January 31 for the 2025 Canadian Law Awards.
