The Chief Justice of the Turks and Caicos Islands issued a generative AI practice direction that applies to all proceedings in all courts in the territory

Why we are running a 2025 instrument in an August 2026 batch

Start with the honest part. Practice Direction 1 of 2025 is more than a year old. It was assented to on 14 July 2025 and it commenced on 4 August 2025. Nothing about it changed this week and we are not presenting it as a development.

We are running it because it is genuinely uncovered. The trade press that tracks judicial AI rules has worked through the big common-law jurisdictions and skipped this one, and an attorney searching for what applies in a Turks and Caicos matter would, until now, have found commentary on England, Australia and a handful of US districts instead.

On the date question: the URL we used carries the tag @2025-08-04, which on that platform denotes a point-in-time version date rather than a signing date. We did not rely on it. We took 4 August 2025 from paragraph 1 of the instrument itself, which says the Practice Direction shall commence on 4 August 2025, and the 14 July 2025 assent date from the publication block that appears both in the web version and on page one of the downloadable PDF.

The scope clause is the reason this is on the list

Paragraph 3 is two lines long and reads: "This Practice Direction shall apply to-(a)all proceedings in all courts in the Turks and Caicos Islands" and "(b)both closed-source and open-source GenAI models." The instrument uses a dash where we have written a hyphen; the words are otherwise as filed.

That is wider than the usual pattern. A practice note issued by a single court binds that court, and a practitioner moving between divisions has to work out which document travels with the matter. Here one paragraph settles it for the whole territory, and it also settles the tool question: an open-weights model run locally is inside the rule, not outside it.

Paragraph 2 then defines who is caught. "Court users" is defined to include attorneys, judicial and legal researchers, court clerks, legal officers and advisors, and self-represented litigants. Judicial officers are addressed separately in paragraph 4. Expert witnesses get their own paragraph. Very little of the courtroom is left outside the definitions.

Our observation, not the court's: the Turks and Caicos is a British Overseas Territory with an offshore financial sector, and US counsel meet its courts in trust, insolvency and financial-services work more often than the population of the territory would suggest. We have no figure for the size of that sector and are not going to imply one. The practical point stands without a number, which is that a US firm can end up filing here without ever having read a TCI practice direction.

Disclosure is required, and it is required twice

Paragraph 7(5) states that a document produced using GenAI shall disclose that GenAI was used. That is the general rule and it is not conditioned on the amount of AI involvement.

Paragraph 10(2) adds a second, more specific requirement for written submissions and skeleton arguments: where GenAI has been used in preparing them, the author shall indicate in the body of the submission or skeleton that GenAI was used. Not in a footnote, not on a cover sheet. The instrument then makes the cover sheet expressly optional in paragraph 10(3) and again in paragraph 13(2), so the body-text indication is the requirement and the tick-box is a convenience.

Paragraph 13(1) layers a third mechanism on top. A judicial officer, attorney or unrepresented litigant who uses GenAI to produce a judgment or ruling, or a document in whole or in part for judicial proceedings, shall acknowledge it by including a Certificate of Use in the form at Appendix B. Appendix B is one sentence with two blanks, naming the tool and version and stating that all legal authorities have been verified.

Note who paragraph 13 reaches. It names judicial officers alongside attorneys and litigants, which is unusual; most disclosure rules of this kind point only at the parties.

Independent verification, and the one place the duty softens

The verification duty is repeated in four places with slightly different wording. Paragraph 5(2) requires that legal research generated shall be verified against trusted legal databases and resources, for accuracy and against known or perceived biases. Paragraph 7(7) requires information generated by GenAI to be verified from official sources such as TCILII, court websites, or recognised legal databases.

Paragraph 10(2) is the sharpest of them. The author must verify that all citations, legal and academic authority and case law and legislative references (a) exist, (b) are accurate, and (c) are relevant to the proceedings. Existence is listed first, which tells you what the drafter was worried about. Paragraph 2 defines "hallucination" for the instrument and expressly includes false citations and fabricated legislative, case or other references.

For unrepresented litigants the duty is personal under paragraph 6(1), and paragraph 6(2) then puts a duty on the court to ascertain that the required verification has been done.

One asymmetry is worth flagging because it is easy to miss. For attorneys and court users the verification language is "shall". For judicial officers, paragraph 4(2) says that where practicable, judicial officers are encouraged to verify GenAI-generated references cited in judgments. That is hortatory, and it sits beside a paragraph 4(1) commitment that the Court will verify the results of any AI-generated outputs used in its work. We report both and draw no conclusion about how they are meant to be reconciled.

Privilege, prohibited uses, and what the Court may do

Confidentiality gets three subparagraphs. Paragraph 8(2) says court users shall not input privileged or sensitive information into unsecured AI platforms, and gives the reason: prompts and interactions may be added automatically to the model database and used to answer other users unless that is disabled. Paragraph 8(3) is flatter still, stating that sensitive material and information to which professional privilege may attach may not be inputted by court users in a public chatbot. Paragraph 8(4) encourages enterprise-grade platforms, a term paragraph 2 defines by naming Westlaw Precision AI and Lexis AI as examples. Paragraph 8(5) reserves the right for the Judiciary to publish a list of recognised or approved AI tools; we found no such list published and did not look for one beyond the instrument.

Two hard prohibitions sit outside paragraph 8. Under paragraph 7(6), GenAI shall not be used in affidavits, witness statements or other evidentiary materials, which shall be produced from personal recollection. Under paragraph 11(1), GenAI shall not be used to draft or prepare the content of an expert report, or any part of one, without prior leave of the Court. Paragraph 9 and paragraph 11(2) set out what a leave application must state, including the tool, whether it is open or closed source, the version, confidentiality settings, the benefit sought and the documents to be fed in.

Now the consequences, and here we are going to stay close to the text. Paragraph 12 is titled Sanctions. It provides that where an attorney uses GenAI to produce a document for use in judicial proceedings, fails to acknowledge the use of GenAI in his work, or fails to verify the sources of law cited in his work, the Court may (a) strike out submissions, (b) refuse to accept improperly verified or undisclosed documents, and (c) impose costs for non-compliance with this Practice Direction.

That is the whole list. No fine scale, no referral to the Bar Council, no contempt language, and no automatic consequence: the verb is "may". Paragraph 12 is also addressed to attorneys by its own terms, and does not on its face extend to unrepresented litigants or experts, both of whom carry duties elsewhere in the instrument. Anyone telling you this practice direction carries a defined penalty is reading something that is not in it.

The regional pattern

By our count six Caribbean courts or judiciaries now have generative AI practice directions or equivalent guidance: the Caribbean Court of Justice, Jamaica, the Turks and Caicos Islands, The Bahamas, Belize, and Trinidad and Tobago. We opened the Turks and Caicos instrument for this piece and no others in that list.

So take the count as an orientation rather than a finding, and take nothing at all from it about the content of the other five. We have not compared their disclosure thresholds, their verification wording or their consequence provisions against this one, and small-jurisdiction practice directions in this area have been known to borrow text from each other, which would make an unchecked comparison worse than no comparison.

What we will say is that a firm with a Caribbean litigation footprint can no longer treat AI disclosure as a question answered once at head office. Six separate instruments issued by six separate judiciaries is six separate scope clauses, and the Turks and Caicos one is the widest we have read in the region.

What we did not verify

What we opened: the full text of Practice Direction 1 of 2025 on TCILII at the point-in-time URL for 4 August 2025, in both the structured web version and the downloadable PDF. The two agree on every paragraph we quote, including paragraph 3, paragraph 7, paragraph 8, paragraph 10, paragraph 11, paragraph 12, paragraph 13 and both appendices. Every quotation in this piece was character-matched against that extracted text, with one flagged exception: the instrument uses a long dash after "shall apply to" in paragraph 3 and we render it as a hyphen because this publication is ASCII-only.

What we did not open: the original Government Gazette scan. The version we read is the Laws.Africa consolidated reproduction hosted on TCILII, which states on its own front matter that legislation in the collection is reproduced as originally printed with minor typographical errors corrected. We also did not open the Supreme Court Act, the Chief Justice (Responsibilities) Act, or the Supreme Court Ordinance recorded as the primary work, so we report the enabling provisions as the instrument states them and have not independently checked the vires. We did not open the Caribbean Court of Justice, Jamaica, Bahamas, Belize or Trinidad and Tobago instruments. We found no judgment applying this Practice Direction and did not search the TCI case law for one.

What we refuse to claim: that non-compliance carries any consequence beyond the three discretionary responses listed in paragraph 12; that paragraph 12 reaches anyone other than attorneys, since its own words do not; that a Judiciary list of approved AI tools exists, since paragraph 8(5) is permissive and we saw no such list; that the Appendix A row reading "Permitted with issue" means "permitted with disclosure", which is what the surrounding rows suggest but is not what the filed text says; and any quantified statement about the size or ranking of the Turks and Caicos financial-services sector, for which we have no figure and offer none.

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