In brief: This opens a column on what artificial intelligence does to people’s lives when it passes through the law, and it opens with a provocation. There is a real continuity between AI and the old tradition of legal formularies, but it breaks at three concrete points. And the decisive change is not where it is usually sought: it is not the lawyer who delegates, it is the person who never had anyone to delegate to and now does.
The word, and what it holds
The Portuguese word for a formulary, prontuário, comes from the Latin promptuarium, the pantry where one stores what may be needed from one moment to the next. The dictionary defines it as the book containing formulae and useful indications, so that what one wants to know may be found at once. The word therefore already carries within it the two things that matter to this discussion: the idea of a repository and the word formula.
A long and respectable tradition
The Roman formulary procedure was built from formulae assembled out of model clauses previously published in the praetor’s edict, with the four parts Gaius enumerates in the Institutes, IV, 39. In the Middle Ages, the Summa totius artis notariae of Rolandino Passaggeri, whose core dates from 1255, displaced in the author’s own lifetime every earlier compilation and served as a reference for centuries. In Portugal there was a continuous line of such works: the Manual do tabellião of José Homem Correia Teles, published in Lisbon in 1823 and reissued until 1862; the Formulário civil, criminal e commercial of José Manuel Álvares, in Coimbra, between 1909 and 1914; the Formulário geral de processo civil, comercial, fiscal e administrativo of A. de Oliveira Ramos and António Simões Correia, which Livraria Ferin kept reissuing from 1955 to 1978. Nobody ever thought using a formulary was beneath them. It was the craft.
The distinction that matters
Seen this way, the continuity looks obvious: the lawyer has the idea and looks for a faster vehicle to carry it. But two figures that usually appear together should be kept apart, because they are not the same. Anyone who says “draft me this defence” and then signs it did not need to wait for artificial intelligence. A trainee sufficed, or any relationship of power over someone, and the figure has existed as long as hierarchies have. Different is the person who conceives the reasoning, defines the strategy, decides the line, and uses the tool only to carry that onto the page more quickly.
Why delegation got worse when the addressee changed
The trainee was a second mind. He could reply that the argument did not hold, that the deadline had passed, that the judgment relied on said the opposite. He could refuse. The machine is not a second mind: it is compliance, and it writes the right argument and the wrong one with equal elegance. The “do this for me” model was safer with people precisely for the reason that made it uncomfortable. Whoever uses the tool only as transport is closer to the classical use of the formulary, but runs a risk of his own, subtler: the finished text lends the idea a degree of maturity it does not yet have. The formulary had that vice too, but had it in plain sight — one knew one was adapting a generic precedent. Generated text is generic invisibly, because it looks bespoke.
Three breaks with the tradition
The first is provenance. The formulary had an author, a title and a year, and could be checked against; one knew where the form came from. Generated text leaves no trail, and there is no way to trace a sentence back to anything. The second is invention. The formulary could be out of date, ill-suited to the case or simply lazy, but it never gave anyone a judgment that does not exist; confident fabrication is a failure mode the tradition of formularies did not know. The third is friction. Adapting a precedent forced one to read it from end to end, and it was along that path that errors appeared; when transport becomes instantaneous, the moment at which things used to be caught disappears.
The figure that says the essential
The database of court decisions involving fabricated citations maintained by Damien Charlotin recorded, on 14 September 2026, 2,041 cases. Of those, 811 are attributed to lawyers and 1,174 to litigants without a lawyer. It is the figure that reorients the whole discussion: what changed was not the act of delegating, which always existed within the professions, but the disappearance of the gatekeeper. Delegating required an office, a hierarchy and money; it was a faculty closed off by power. Today anyone has someone to write the pleading — well written, plausible, and with nobody to tell them they are going to lose. Portugal already has one recorded case: the Guimarães Court of Appeal, by judgment of 10 February 2026, recorded six non-existent judgments cited in a pleading, ordered costs and directed that a copy be sent to the Bar Association.
The rules are not new
No new legislation is needed to know what applies. Article 92 of the Statute of the Bar Association covers professional secrecy; article 100(1)(b) requires the lawyer to study with care and handle with diligence the matter entrusted to him, using all the resources of his experience, knowledge and activity; article 90(2)(a) forbids the use of unlawful means or expedients and the pursuit of steps known to be dilatory, useless or harmful to the correct application of the law or the discovery of the truth; and article 88 imposes honesty, probity, rectitude, loyalty, courtesy and sincerity. As for Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, a common misunderstanding is worth dispelling: the high-risk systems in annex III concerning the administration of justice relate to tools used by or on behalf of a judicial authority, and not to the tool running in the lawyer’s own office, whose framework remains that of professional ethics and data protection.
What to do in practice
Three habits cover almost all of the risk. Always verify that what is cited exists, by opening the database of the court invoked and searching for the exact case number, and confirming that the quoted passage really is inside the judgment once opened — a share of the errors are real decisions credited with a passage they never contained. Confirm each statute in the consolidated legislation of the Official Gazette, where the version in force and the repeals are visible. And do not put client data into tools whose processing is not understood, because of article 92 and of the processor regime. The next edition looks at the other side of the counter, which is what truly concerns this column: what changes for the person who has no lawyer and now has someone to write the pleading.
The full newsletter
This note forms part of the edition of 18 September 2026 of the firm’s biweekly newsletter, with thirty-two items in Portuguese and English. The full document, on letterhead, is available here.
This note is provided for information purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Concrete solutions depend on the facts of each case and on the regime applicable at the time. For specific questions, please consult a lawyer.