An AI legal chatbot will explain terms, summarise a contract and suggest what to ask. But it does not know the current wording of the law, it makes up court decisions, it does not track deadlines, it does not know your case and nobody is answerable for it. It is enough for a first orientation or simpler legal steps, not for decisions in your own case.
It can explain clearly what a limitation period, a notice period or a contractual penalty means, and summarise a twenty-page contract in a few sentences. It will help you sort out what happened and put together questions for the other side or for a lawyer. It can also draft a first version of a payment reminder or a reply to a consumer complaint, which you must then check yourself. It is fast and costs a few crowns or is completely free.
Explanations of terms and general templates are general legal information. Anyone may share it, and the Czech Bar Association does not treat it as a legal service as long as it is information “available to the general public without individualising the answer to a specific question of the user”. Once you want the program to assess your own matter, draft a document tailored to your dispute and tell you what to do, you are in a different situation. Language models also tend to please the person asking and agree with them, so they will readily confirm that you are in the right even when you are not.
It fails mainly in five areas, and a layperson usually does not notice. This applies above all to free and cheap chatbots. A tool connected to current legislation and case law that cross-checks its answers makes fewer mistakes. Such checking, however, consumes many times more computing power, which is why you will rarely get it for free or for a few crowns.
Outdated law. The model learned from texts up to a certain date, and laws change several times a year. A different subsistence minimum has applied since 1 October 2026 and a different version of the Czech Civil Procedure Code since 1 September 2026. A chatbot will often answer according to a rule that no longer applies, without letting you know.
Fictitious decisions. They are the most dangerous error because they look the most credible. A layman, convinced he was right, relied in his appeal on four non-existent Supreme Court judgments, complete with their headnotes, which according to the court were most likely produced by artificial intelligence. The appellate court refused to deal with them and ruled against him on the merits. The appeal cost him a further CZK 22,034 in the other side’s costs; for both instances he is paying more than CZK 57,000 (Regional Court in České Budějovice, Tábor branch, file no. 15 Co 100/2026). But lawyers fall for fictitious decisions too. In December 2025, for example, the Czech Constitutional Court fined one of them CZK 25,000 for a constitutional complaint in which the lawyer relied on twelve decisions of the Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights. The court found that “a substantial part of these decisions does not exist at all” and concluded that the lawyer had most likely produced the complaint with the help of artificial intelligence and not checked the citations (resolution file no. I. ÚS 3004/25). A database that collects such cases worldwide listed 2,286 of them as at 9 November 2026, 1,314 involving people without a lawyer.
Newer, constantly improving models invent entire decisions less often. More treacherous is that they, too, very often cite a decision that exists and even concerns a similar matter, but does not say what it is cited for. In the database mentioned above, entirely fabricated sources account for 3,728 of 6,773 recorded errors; most of the rest are real sources whose content was misrepresented (1,897) and false verbatim quotations (1,107). We recently came across such a submission by the other side’s lawyers in our own practice: it looked convincing and relied on eight Supreme Court decisions, yet none of them supported the other side’s claims and some even favoured our client.
Deadlines and service. A chatbot does not know when you were served with what, and cannot work out from that by when you must respond. Against a Czech payment order you defend yourself by filing an objection, a written statement of disagreement sent to the court that issued the order. You have 15 days from service (Section 172(1) of the Civil Procedure Code). If you miss the deadline, the payment order has the effect of a final judgment, however good the advice you received (Section 174(1)). Only very exceptionally, if you missed the deadline for an excusable reason and apply within 15 days after the obstacle ceased, will the court excuse the delay (Section 58). Do not count on it.
The context of your case. AI depends entirely on the information you give it yourself, often without any guidance from it. It usually does not ask about what you left out because it did not seem important to you, and that is often where the core of the dispute lies. It is poor at telling what matters from what does not, and it has no experience of the courtroom.
Confidentiality. What you paste into a free chatbot goes to someone else’s servers under the operator’s terms. A lawyer is bound by statutory confidentiality (Section 21(1) of the Czech Legal Profession Act); a program is not. Other people’s personal data do not belong in free tools; black them out before uploading a document.
Describe what happened, with dates and amounts. Where possible, upload the whole document concerned, that is the contract, letter or decision, even as a photo or scan: current models can read images, and the full text gives them context that a retelling would miss. Upload a document to a free tool only with names, birth numbers, addresses and account numbers deleted or blacked out.
Ask the AI for the specific statutory provisions and check each of them in the official e-Sbírka collection of laws. An older contract or event may be governed by the wording in force at that time; e-Sbírka can show the wording as at any date. Ask separately about deadlines and what happens if you miss them. Ask what documents you would need if it came to a dispute. And finally ask the AI to say what it is unsure about, what it does not know about your situation and how the other side would see the matter.
Treat case citations from a chatbot as a lead to look up, not as proof. Do not use a decision you cannot find in the databases of the Supreme Court, the Supreme Administrative Court, the Constitutional Court or on the justice.cz portal until you have seen its full text. And even when you find it, read whether it really says what the AI claims.
In the Czech Republic, legal services may be provided only by lawyers and a few other professions within their field, such as notaries or tax advisers (Section 2 of the Legal Profession Act). The law prohibits offering or providing legal services without such authorisation. A program cannot hold an authorisation, which is why operators of free chatbots themselves state that they do not provide legal advice.
On 9 September 2026 the Czech Bar Association issued an interpretative opinion on artificial intelligence in legal services. According to it, “GenAI is a tool, not an entity authorised to provide legal services”. The opinion treats as a legal service platforms that call themselves an “Online lawyer”, “AI lawyer” or “Virtual lawyer” and present themselves as a substitute for a lawyer, as well as services that promise specific legal steps. A general-purpose tool is not a legal service if it carries a disclaimer that outputs which could amount to a legal service “must be consulted with a person authorised to provide legal services”. A lawyer may use AI but remains responsible for the result and must check the output.
When the amount at stake would hurt to lose. When a deadline is running, typically after you have been served with a lawsuit, a payment order or a notice of termination. When you are about to sign a contract that is hard to undo, such as a purchase contract for a flat or a guarantee for someone else’s debt. When the other side has a lawyer. And when two chatbots give you two different answers.
A lawyer is liable to you for harm caused in connection with practising law (Section 24(1) of the Legal Profession Act) and must be insured for that purpose (Section 24a(1)). So if a lawyer causes you damage by a mistake, they must compensate you, and that is exactly what the compulsory insurance is for. You must, however, prove both the error and the amount of the loss. No program offers that.
If you cannot afford a lawyer, the Czech Bar Association will, on request, appoint a lawyer to give you free legal advice of up to 120 minutes a year. You qualify if you do not yet have a lawyer in the matter and your average monthly income over the past six months does not exceed three times the subsistence minimum, which for a single person is CZK 16,500 (as at November 2026). The application is made on a form and there is a CZK 100 fee, from which some groups, such as holders of a severe disability card (ZTP), are exempt. The consultation is usually in person (Section 18a of the Legal Profession Act). It does not usually cover drafting submissions or representation; you can ask the Bar separately to appoint a lawyer for such a service (Section 18c). Other free advice centres, from citizens’ advice bureaus to the advice service of the Chamber of Bailiffs, are listed by the Ministry of Justice signpost page (in Czech).
Use AI for what it does well: explaining terms, summarising text, preparing questions. For an assessment of your own matter, look for a person who stands behind the answer. I work with artificial intelligence every day, but it cites to me only from connected sources, that is the current e-Sbírka, full texts of decisions, paid legal databases and legal literature. I assess every output on the basis of my legal education and, above all, the professional judgment of fifteen years of practice. Send me your documents and usually within two working days I will tell you free of charge whether and on what terms I can help. How it works and what it costs is on the page English-speaking lawyer in Prague.
Sources: Czech Legal Profession Act (Sections 1, 2, 5, 18a, 18c, 21, 24, 24a), Civil Procedure Code (Sections 58, 172, 174), Subsistence Minimum Act (Section 2), Czech Bar Association interpretative opinion on AI in legal services of 9 September 2026 and the court decisions listed in the analysis. Czech provisions and decisions are quoted in our translation.
In its resolution of 1 December 2025, file no. I. ÚS 3004/25, the Constitutional Court fined a lawyer CZK 25,000. The complainant’s representative “relied on a total of 12 decisions of the Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights. After careful study of the constitutional complaint, the Constitutional Court found that a substantial part of these decisions does not exist at all and part of them is grossly misinterpreted by the party fined.” The court added that communication with it cannot take place at the proper level “if complainants’ legal representatives were to burden the Constitutional Court senselessly with submissions in which they rely on non-existent legal sources”.
The key sentence reads: “It does not matter with the help of which persons or tools lawyers prepare submissions to the court. As legal professionals, however, they take full responsibility for the submission and are therefore also responsible for any hallucinating argumentation of artificial intelligence, if it was used to create the submission.” The court set the fine at a quarter of the statutory range (the law allows up to CZK 100,000) because it was a first offence and the defect could still be remedied. The court expressly described the use of artificial intelligence as its presumption; it imposed the fine because the lawyer misled the court and seriously obstructed the proceedings. A later resolution of 30 January 2026 under the same file number dismissed the complaint after the defects had been remedied.
Eleven days later the court dealt with a submission from a complainant without a lawyer (resolution of 12 December 2025, file no. I. ÚS 3589/25). The submission “shows clear signs of having been written with the help of artificial intelligence (formatting and stylistic editing, but also reference to inapposite case law or fabricated conclusions that do not follow from the decisions cited)”. The court refrained from a fine only “having regard to the social and financial situation of the complainant” and expressly added that a fine is not ruled out for similar submissions in the future. The threat therefore applies even to those who write their submissions themselves.
In its judgment of 21 May 2026, file no. 15 Co 100/2026, the Regional Court in České Budějovice, Tábor branch, stated that the defendant “in the appeal of 12 March 2026 referred to Supreme Court decisions file nos. 22 Cdo 1222/2001, 22 Cdo 1108/2005, 22 Cdo 2441/2008 and 22 Cdo 1574/2001, including headnotes, but no such Supreme Court decisions exist”. The appellate court was “convinced that these are submissions created by or with the help of artificial intelligence; there is therefore no reasonable ground for the appellate court to comment in any way on these non-existent decisions, including non-existent headnotes”. The appeal failed on the merits. The appellate court only reduced the costs for the first instance to CZK 35,467.80, and the defendant also pays the costs of the appeal of CZK 22,034.10.
In its judgment of 28 January 2026, file no. 24 C 333/2025, the District Court for Prague-East described a consumer’s submission in a dispute with a bank: it “showed certain signs of the use of artificial intelligence (only general assertions, general identification of evidence, repetitive wording of factual assertions, bullet-point sentences, reference to a non-existent Supreme Court decision). The defendant did not attach any documents to the submission.” The court granted the bank’s claim in full. Both decisions are publicly available on the justice.cz portal.
In its judgment of 15 October 2025, ref. 3 As 34/2025-80, the Supreme Administrative Court checked the quotations in the successful claimant’s submissions and reached “the unequivocal conclusion that not a single one of them is found in the decisions referred to”; four of the decisions cited “do not exist at all”. The court concluded: “Whoever or whatever wrote those statements, the court did not consider them, taken as a whole, helpful in any way for the case, and therefore could not regard the costs of producing them as reasonably incurred.” The successful claimant thus received no compensation for those submissions of his lawyer; the court awarded only CZK 3,340 for another, short step.
In its judgment of 1 July 2026, ref. 10 As 81/2026-27, the same court described a cassation complaint as “a text apparently generated using artificial intelligence (AI), which the lawyer did not take much trouble to revise”, nevertheless examined the generated “AI slop” (low-quality text churned out by artificial intelligence) thoroughly and “urgently calls on” the lawyer “to avoid such a careless approach in future”. And the Regional Court in Ústí nad Labem, Liberec branch, in its judgment of 16 July 2026, ref. 73 A 19/2025-37, made the same criticism of a regional authority: “The reasoning of an administrative decision cannot work with case-law references (apparently produced using generative artificial intelligence) whose accuracy has not been verified.”
The best known is Mata v. Avianca, Inc. (S.D.N.Y., 22 June 2023): two New York lawyers submitted decisions invented by ChatGPT and stood by them even after the court questioned their existence. Judge Castel imposed a USD 5,000 penalty and ordered letters to be sent to the client and to the judges falsely identified as authors of the fake opinions. He also wrote that “there is nothing inherently improper about using a reliable artificial intelligence tool for assistance”, but the rules impose a gatekeeping role on lawyers to ensure the accuracy of their filings.
In Ayinde v London Borough of Haringey and Al-Haroun v Qatar National Bank [2025] EWHC 1383 (Admin) of 6 June 2025, the English High Court summarised: “Freely available generative artificial intelligence tools, trained on a large language model such as ChatGPT are not capable of conducting reliable legal research.” In Al-Haroun, eighteen of the cases cited did not exist. In Ayinde, Ritchie J had earlier ordered the barrister and the law centre to pay £2,000 each in wasted costs, and the High Court referred the matters to the professional regulators.
The Board’s opinion replaces the opinion of 2023. Its key sentences read: “Legal services are provided only by persons authorised to do so by law; GenAI is a tool, not an entity authorised to provide legal services. It is therefore not permissible for GenAI to be used in such a way that it provides legal services without a lawyer’s supervision in each individual case, since the lawyer is always responsible for the legal service provided.” The opinion regards as a service presented as legal one that “is designated as ‘Online lawyer’, ‘AI lawyer’, ‘Virtual lawyer’ (in the sense of a substitute for a lawyer) or by similar designations”, or that is promoted with the words “we provide legal advice”, “we solve legal problems” or “you do not need an expensive lawyer”.
Conversely, a legal service is not “the dissemination of general legal information (texts of laws, case law) available to the general public without individualising the answer to a specific question of the user”, nor a general-purpose text tool “if they contain a disclaimer that outputs which could materially meet the characteristics of a legal service must be consulted with a person authorised to provide legal services”. For lawyers, the opinion states that “artificial intelligence, including generative artificial intelligence, is a permissible tool”, that the output serves “merely as a basis for the legal service provided” and that a lawyer “must not enter confidential information or personal data into artificial intelligence tools without appropriate contractual and technical safeguards”.
The provision of legal services means “representation in proceedings before courts and other bodies, defence in criminal matters, giving legal advice, drafting documents, preparing legal analyses and other forms of legal assistance, if carried out on a regular basis and for remuneration” (Section 1(2) of the Legal Profession Act). Those authorised are lawyers and European lawyers (Section 2(1)), alongside them notaries, court bailiffs, patent attorneys and tax advisers within the scope of special laws, and employees in relation to their employer (Section 2(2)). “Offering or providing legal services by a person who is not authorised to provide them under subsection 1 or 2 is prohibited” (Section 2(3)).
A person usually becomes a Czech lawyer (advokát) after obtaining a master’s degree in law, completing three years as a trainee lawyer and passing the bar examination (Section 5(1) of the Legal Profession Act). The law also recognises certain other practice and examinations; what counts is entry in the register of lawyers. By contrast, any law graduate may call themselves a lawyer in the general sense (právník). The practical rule for you: whoever advises you on your own matter should be an advokát (or, in a narrow field, another authorised profession such as a tax adviser), and you can check an advokát in the register on the Bar Association’s website.
A person who does not meet the conditions for a court-appointed lawyer “and cannot otherwise secure the provision of legal services” has the right to have the Bar Association appoint a lawyer to give legal advice or provide a legal service (Section 18(2) of the Legal Profession Act). An applicant is entitled to advice if their “average monthly income for the 6 calendar months preceding the application does not exceed three times the subsistence minimum of an individual or of the persons assessed jointly with them” (Section 18a(1)). A further condition is that the applicant is not represented by another lawyer in the matter, and “where there are reasons deserving special consideration, the income requirement may be waived”. The advice is given “for a minimum of 30 minutes, up to a maximum of 120 minutes of legal advice in each calendar year” (Section 18a(2)), the application may be filed “only on a form” (Section 18a(3)) and a fee of CZK 100 is payable for processing it, from which, for example, holders of a ZTP or ZTP/P disability card, persons under 15 and recipients of state social assistance benefits including a subsistence component are exempt (Section 18a(5)). The appointed lawyer’s fee is paid by the state (Section 23(2)).
The advice does not cover drafting submissions or representation. For such a service you can apply for the appointment of a lawyer under Section 18c of the Legal Profession Act, but you must show that you unsuccessfully tried to obtain the legal service “through at least two lawyers approached” (Section 18c(3)).
Since 1 October 2026 the subsistence minimum for an individual has been CZK 5,500 a month, so the threshold for a single person is CZK 16,500. For a family, the subsistence minima of all persons assessed jointly are added up. Applications are handled nationwide by the Bar Association’s Brno branch; forms and the procedure are on the page cak.cz/pravni-pomoc (in Czech). Free advice is also available from citizens’ advice bureaus (social counselling, not legal analysis), the dTest consumer advice line, the online advice service of the Chamber of Bailiffs on enforcement, and, for foreigners, the Integration Centre Prague, mainly in residence matters.
Provisions quoted from Acts No. 85/1996 Coll., No. 99/1963 Coll. and No. 110/2006 Coll. as in force on the date of publication (e-Sbírka, checked 24 to 26 October and 5 to 9 November 2026), in our translation. Case law checked against full texts: Constitutional Court resolutions I. ÚS 3004/25 of 1 December 2025 and I. ÚS 3589/25 of 12 December 2025 (NALUS), Supreme Administrative Court judgments 3 As 34/2025-80 of 15 October 2025 and 10 As 81/2026-27 of 1 July 2026, and judgment of the Regional Court in Ústí nad Labem, Liberec branch, 73 A 19/2025-37 of 16 July 2026 (NSS search engine), judgments of the Regional Court in České Budějovice, Tábor branch, 15 Co 100/2026-121 of 21 May 2026 and of the District Court for Prague-East 24 C 333/2025-100 of 28 January 2026 (rozhodnuti.justice.cz), Mata v. Avianca, Inc., No. 22-cv-1461 (PKC), S.D.N.Y., 22 June 2023 (CourtListener), Ayinde v London Borough of Haringey and Al-Haroun v Qatar National Bank [2025] EWHC 1383 (Admin), 6 June 2025, paras 49 and 74 (judiciary.uk). Czech Bar Association Board interpretative opinion on artificial intelligence in legal services issued 9 September 2026, quoted from the PDF on cak.cz. AI Hallucination Cases database (Damien Charlotin) as at 9 November 2026.
Send me what the AI told you together with the documents: the contract, correspondence or decision. Usually within two working days I will tell you free of charge whether and on what terms I can help. If a deadline is running, tell me when it ends.
I work with artificial intelligence. How I work with it and what it costs is on the page English-speaking lawyer in Prague.
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