Sweeting: Three complaints in four years
A High Court judge has been issued with a formal warning for misconduct over significant delays in handing down judgments in two cases – but cleared of using AI in drafting one of them.
Mr Justice Derek Sweeting had previously received the lower sanction of formal advice after a delayed judgment in 2023.
He joined the High Court bench at the start of 2022 after his year as chair of the Bar Council.
The Judicial Conduct Investigations Office (JCIO) said it had received two separate complaints from lawyers about delays.
In the first, Sweeting J handed down judgment 11 months after the hearing in July 2024. The same complainant also alleged that a draft judgment circulated in June 2025 contained serious inaccuracies “suggestive of serious irregularity in the drafting process, such as the possible use of artificial intelligence (AI)”.
The second complaint involved judgment handed down eight months after the October 2024 hearing, a delay which it was said caused “substantial practical, procedural and financial detriment”.
The JCIO recorded that Sweeting J acknowledged the delays and cited various reasons for the delays, including workload pressures and personal circumstances during summer 2024.
He accepted that there were serious drafting errors in the first judgment, which he said “arose from mistakes made under pressure and were not indicative of having used AI in relation to the judgment”.
Sweeting J added that he had since caught up with his outstanding judgments.
The nominated (investigating) judge found that the delays amounted to misconduct.
“While the drafting errors referred to in the first complaint were serious and required correction, they did not independently constitute misconduct; rather, they formed part of the overall lack of diligence associated with the delay,” the JCIO said.
“The nominated judge found no evidence that AI had been used in producing the judgment.”
In recommending a sanction of formal warning, the nominated judge noted that Sweeting J had received a sanction of formal advice for a delayed judgment in September 2023 – that one was 14 months after the hearing, for which he cited his “busy sitting schedule and personal matters”.
He had also “not expressed remorse for the delays or the errors in one of the judgments”.
The Lord Chancellor, Shabana Mahmood, and the Lady Chief Justice, Baroness Carr, accepted the recommendation and issued the warning.
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