Lawyers, be forewarned: In what could be a foreshadowing of things to come, a judge has penalized two lawyers for failing to use artificial intelligence.

The case comes to us by way of Ontario. It arose after a woman named Kristen Cass slipped and fell in a tavern in Port Dalhousie, a waterfront community on Lake Ontario, 30 minutes by car from Niagara Falls.

Predictably, Cass sued. The tavern owner defaulted, so her lawsuit proceeded solely against the building’s owner, the Port Dalhousie Vitalization Corporation (PDVC). PDVC won summary judgment dismissing the action against it. Thereafter, its lawyers asked the court to award them reimbursement of their attorneys’ fees and costs.

From the outset of the opinion, written by Mr. Justice A.C.R. Whitten of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, it was clear that the request would not fare well.

Justice Whitten began his analysis by questioning why PDVC had required two attorneys on the case. “The initial preparation, file opening, investigation, pleadings and disclosure, examination for discovery and fulfilment of undertakings are not so complex that there would be any need for a division of labour,” he wrote.

He noted disapprovingly that counsel had billed 26.5 hours to defend against a motion that is typically approved pro forma. He criticized the lawyers for “playing hardball” and driving up the costs of the case. “A more measured approach would have been to ‘keep your powder dry,’” he opined.

Justice Whitten was no more pleased with the 80 hours billed for preparing the summary judgment motion, which he said should have been 20 or 30 hours at most. And why, he wondered, had solicitor’s time been claimed for two appearances handled by a law student?

Having thus eviscerated the lawyers’ request for fees, Justice Whitten then turned to the lawyers’ claimed disbursements of $24,300.67.

Nearly half of these disbursements, $10,000, were for the expert opinion of an orthopedic specialist. Justice Whitten cut that by half, noting that the expert had never had to testify and that the plaintiff’s orthopedic expert had billed only $3,000.

After dismissing a second facet of the disbursement claim as “schizophrogenic,” Justice Whitten at last arrived at the claimed cost of $900 for legal research, which he immediately characterized as “problematic.”

“One assumes that counsel graduated with the basic legal knowledge we all possess,” he wrote. “This matter was unlikely his first blush with the world of ‘occupier’s liability’, and specifically the liability of landlords. … [G]iven all the base experience and knowledge, the need for ‘research’ by some anonymous identity is questionable.”

Even conceding that some amount of research was required, Justice Whitten raised two questions about the costs. First, he questioned why there would be a legal research fee for case precedents that are available for free through CanLII (the Canadian Legal Information Institute) or other publicly accessible websites.

Then — and here is where we finally get to the point of this piece — he questioned the time spent in research, asserting it would have been less had counsel used AI. “If artificial intelligence sources were employed, no doubt counsel’s preparation time would have been significantly reduced.”

By the time he was done, he had cut the disbursements claim by $11,400, including eliminating the entire amount sought for research.

So that was it. No great exposition on the history and science of AI or its applications within legal research. No specifics as to what type of AI the judge had in mind or how it might have been used. It was little more than a throwaway line — albeit one that was undeniably au courant.

In truth, the judge’s supposition about the efficacy of AI in this situation probably did not even hold water. Which AI product did the judge think would have helped in this case? What would it have cost to use the product? What would have been the learning curve?

Remember, we’re talking about a $900 legal research bill.

But even with all of that said, it is hard not to see this as a foreshadowing of judicial opinions to come. In a recent column here about legal analytics, I speculated that we may have neared the point where it would be malpractice not to use analytics.

By the same token, as courts come to understand that AI can reduce the time — and therefore the cost — of legal tasks, why wouldn’t they expect lawyers to use it and penalize those who do not? In fact, we have already seen this in the e-discovery realm, starting with the pioneering 2012 decision by U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew J. Peck, Da Silva Moore v. Publicis Groupe, recognizing that computer-assisted review is superior to other methods.

In the scheme of things, this is a minor opinion. But it is a reminder that lawyers need to be cognizant of the capabilities of AI and give consideration to its use in the cases they handle. Otherwise, you may someday face a judge who calls your motion “problematic” or, worse yet, “schizophrogenic.”

Robert Ambrogi is a Massachusetts lawyer and journalist who has been covering legal technology and the web for more than 20 years, primarily through his blog LawSites.com. Former editor-in-chief of several legal newspapers, he is a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an inaugural Fastcase 50 honoree. He can be reached by email at ambrogi@gmail.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@BobAmbrogi).