- A London judge says a claimant used smart glasses to cheat in court
- The claimant was being fed answers in real-time from the smart glasses
- The evidence was dismissed for being “unreliable and untruthful”
It sounds like a deleted scene from Suits, but a judge in a London High Court case has revealed that a claimant recently used smart glasses to get real-time coaching on their answers — and then later blamed ChatGPT.
The insolvency case, which centered around the liquidation of a Lithuanian company co-owned by Laimonas Jakstys, took place in January, but was recently reported by Legal Futures (via 404 Media) when the judgment was published. And it’s full of fascinating, if slightly comical, clashes between a courtroom and new technology.
The judge first noticed something was awry when Jakstys started pausing before answers. “Right at the start of his cross examination, he seemed to pause quite a bit before replying to the questions being asked,” Judge Agnello KC noted in the judgement.
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After this happened a few times, the defense lawyer, Sarah Walker, said she could “hear interference coming from around Mr Jakstys,” and this was backed up by the interpreter. The judge asked the claimant to remove the glasses before continuing with the cross-examination, but that was just the start of a comical turn of events.
While the interpreter was later translating a question, Mr. Jakstys’ mobile phone apparently “started broadcasting out loud with the voice of someone talking”, the judgment notes. “There was clearly someone on the mobile phone talking to Mr. Jakstys. He then removed his mobile phone from his inner jacket pocket. At my direction, the smart glasses and his mobile were placed into the hands of his solicitor,” wrote Judge Agnello KC.
Amusingly, Jakstys turned up to court wearing the glasses the following day, but was then told to turn them off. “When asked, Mr. Jakstys denied that he was using the smart glasses to receive the answers that he was to give in court to the questions being asked. He also denied that his smart glasses were linked to his mobile phone at the time that he was giving evidence before me,” the judge added.
Unfortunately, the evidence didn’t back this up. According to Jakstys’ call log, he’d called and received calls from someone marked on his phone as “abra kadabra”, including one just before he went into the witness box. When pressed on the identity of “abra kadabra”, Jakstys claimed it was a taxi driver. But the judge understandably wasn’t convinced.
‘A career first for me’
The smart glasses, the pausing before answers, and the mysterious “abra kadabra” contact — this case has all the ingredients of a CSI-style Netflix documentary. But there was one final twist.
When asked about the voice blaring out from his phone when his smart glasses had been removed, “his explanation was that he thought it was ChatGPT”. Understandably, Judge Agnello KC concluded that this “lacks any credibility”.
Jakstys also seemed to mysteriously struggle without his glasses. “Once Mr Jakstys was [sic] no longer had his smart glasses, he hesitated quite a bit before providing answers to questions. Frequently, he was asked a question and he would pause for some time before asking for the question to be repeated or he would say he did not understand the question. This occurred frequently when it was clear to me he simply did not know what his reply should be,” concluded Judge Agnello KC.
The inevitable result was that Jakstys’ evidence was rejected “in its entirety”. Summing up the testimony, the judge concluded “he was untruthful in relation to his use about the smart glasses and in being coached through the smart glasses”.
But the case naturally also raises broader questions about the clash between our longstanding institutions and technology that’s quickly overtaking them. As the barrister Saara Idelbi noted about the case on LinkedIn, “This time it was a human coach. Next time, it will be AI. This case shows us how dangerous smart wearables can be.”
The defense lawyer Sarah Walker also told Legal Futures: “This was a career first for me but, with technological advances, may well be something that litigators have to deal with much more frequently in the coming years.”
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mark.wilson@futurenet.com (Mark Wilson)
