Alberta’s courts asked lawyers and litigants to verify AI-touched material against authoritative sources. They deliberately stopped short of what Manitoba and Yukon had already required: telling the court AI was used at all.
Key takeaways
/qb/ to /kb/ with Alberta's court renaming; the old form redirects.On October 6, 2023, the Court of Appeal of Alberta, the Court of King’s Bench of Alberta and the Alberta Court of Justice issued a joint Notice to the Public and Legal Profession titled “Ensuring the Integrity of Court Submissions When Using Large Language Models.” It now sits in Alberta Courts’ notice index as NPP 2025-06 — the catalogue number is newer than the document, which is still dated October 6, 2023. (Alberta Courts, Tri-Court Notice, Oct 6 2023) The notice also lives at a /kb/ path (King’s Bench, following the province’s 2023 court renaming); the older /qb/ form of the URL redirects there.
The notice is short — three headed paragraphs, not a rulebook. Caution: the three courts “urge practitioners and litigants to exercise caution when referencing legal authorities or analysis derived from LLMs in their submissions.” Reliance: “it is essential that parties rely exclusively on authoritative sources such as official court websites, commonly referenced commercial publishers, or well-established public services such as CanLII.” “Human in the loop”: “any AI-generated submissions must be verified with meaningful human control. Verification can be achieved through cross-referencing with reliable legal databases, ensuring that the citations and their content hold up to scrutiny.” (Alberta Courts, Tri-Court Notice)
A footnote defines the term the whole notice turns on: “the term ‘large language model’ refers to a type of artificial intelligence (AI) system capable of processing and generating human-like text based on vast amounts of training data.” (Alberta Courts, Tri-Court Notice)
Alberta’s notice does not require disclosure. That is a deliberate contrast, not an oversight: the Law Society of Alberta’s own survey of Canadian AI guidance notes that “unlike Yukon and Manitoba, Alberta did not require lawyers or litigants to disclose what tools they use to prepare court filings” — both of which had already imposed a disclosure duty by the time Alberta’s notice issued. (LSA, Gen AI Rules of Engagement) Manitoba’s Court of King’s Bench required, from June 2023, that “when artificial intelligence has been used in the preparation of materials filed with the court, the materials must indicate how artificial intelligence was used.” Yukon’s Supreme Court, days later, required any party who relies on AI for research or submissions to “advise the Court of the tool used and for what purpose.” (LSA, Gen AI Rules of Engagement) Three provinces, three different answers to the same question, issued within four months of each other.
Because Alberta does not require a lawyer to flag AI use, the practical protection against a fabricated authority sits entirely in the Reliance clause: an authority has to trace to an “official court website,” a “commonly referenced commercial publisher” or CanLII — not to whatever an LLM produced when asked for a case name. That is the same concern the Federal Court frames as the risk of a fabricated authority passing for a real one, though the two courts reach it from different angles — the Federal Court through a filing declaration, Alberta through a verification duty with no declaration attached. (Federal Court, Notice to the Parties and the Profession, May 7 2024)
It is worth noticing what kind of document this is. Alberta did not produce three separate court notices that happened to agree; the Court of Appeal, the Court of King’s Bench and the Alberta Court of Justice issued one text, signed by all three chief justices — Ritu Khullar, Mary Moreau and James Hunter. A litigant or lawyer moving between levels of court in Alberta is not dealing with three different AI policies; the same Caution, Reliance and “Human in the loop” standard travels with the file regardless of which of the three courts it is filed in. (Alberta Courts, Tri-Court Notice) That is a genuinely different structure from Ontario, where the civil and criminal Consolidated Practice Directions each carry their own AI section separately, or from the federal system, where the Federal Court’s notice binds only proceedings before it.
The tri-court notice is a court document — it governs what happens in a proceeding. It is not the Law Society of Alberta’s own professional-conduct guidance for lawyers using generative AI, which is a separate resource covering competence, confidentiality and billing and applies whether or not a court filing is ever made. (LSA, Gen AI Rules of Engagement) A lawyer can comply fully with the notice’s verification expectation in a specific filing and still fall short of the Law Society’s separate expectations around client confidentiality if, for instance, they pasted a client’s facts into a public tool while drafting it. The two sit side by side rather than one inside the other.
A self-represented litigant in Calgary drafts a factum using a free AI chatbot, which invents two case names that read as plausible Alberta Court of King’s Bench decisions. Under Alberta’s notice, nothing required the litigant to say AI was used — but the Reliance clause already told them the citations needed to trace to CanLII or an official court site, and they did not. If a judge or opposing counsel cannot verify the cases, the practical consequence runs through ordinary civil procedure — the authenticity of anything relied on in a factum can be challenged — rather than through a specific AI-disclosure penalty, because Alberta chose not to create one. (treadstonelaw.ca, evidence in Ontario civil proceedings) The same fact pattern in Ontario engages a formal certification and sanctions regime instead, which is a genuinely different legal exposure for the same underlying mistake.
Related: the Federal Court’s rules on AI in filings, what happens when AI invents a case citation, and regulated professions and AI guidance
No. Alberta's tri-court notice does not impose a disclosure duty, unlike Manitoba's and Yukon's 2023 practice directions. Its operative requirement is that any authority you rely on must trace to an official court website, a recognized commercial publisher, or CanLII.
The notice is framed around large language models specifically, footnote-defined as AI systems that process and generate human-like text from training data. It targets referencing authorities or analysis derived from that kind of tool in a court submission.
The notice itself sets out caution and a verification expectation rather than a named penalty. The practical exposure runs through Alberta's ordinary rules on the reliability of what's put before the court, and through professional-conduct obligations separately from the notice.
The same reliance problem shows up outside courtrooms, in any diligence exercise built on AI-drafted material.