Energy biz SSE smacked around in court by a guy and AI

British energy company SSE Energy Supply refused to believe that there was no unit 8b at the property of Lyle Hopkins, a doctoral student at the University of Oxford.

For more than 20 months, the company billed Hopkins at business rates, a total of £1,091.01, for an unused electricity meter on the property that had been associated with a previous owner's unsuccessful effort to convert the property into flats.

A company representative even sent an email on June 15, 2024, stating that Hopkins was not liable.

Nonetheless, SSE then sent in debt collectors to recover debt attributed to a disconnected meter for a non-existent address.

He never paid the bill.

But he wanted the harassment to end.

So Hopkins, a software engineer working on his PhD at Oxford Interdisciplinary Bioscience DTP, turned to GPT-5.5 and Claude Fable for legal guidance to challenge the unwarranted and annoying collection effort.

Representing himself in court, he prevailed on July 17, when a judge at the County Court at Oxford (St Aldate) awarded him £1,087.88, including expenses and interest.

Citing The Register's coverage of how courts have required lawyers to declare and verify AI-generated documents, Hopkins said his experience has been that it's the verification that matters.

"I used AI to test an energy company's court claims against its own records, then ran the hearing myself and won," he said.

Hopkins said he wouldn't have been able to quote the case law without the help of AI.

"I had to review everything and give it steering, and make sure the case law actually existed," he said.

"I mostly just gave it the facts and it came up with the arguments, checked the laws, court rules, case law, and regulations.

Really I just knew what they had done couldn't be right, and relied on the AI to find the legal justifications as to why." Hopkins said that when he first submitted his claim back on October 7, 2025, GPT models hallucinated more and weren't as good at checking case law.