RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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See the full story · 1 sourcesCompany's three year pursuit of debt from non-existent address ended by Oxford judge
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.
"If Fable had been around at the time, I probably would have claimed for a lot more, probably around £5,000 and included harassment, which would have been more in line with the case law it found when we were preparing the court documents about three weeks before the hearing."
Hopkins didn't consider a solicitor because the cost would have been prohibitive. His spending on AI was more modest but not trivial – three active AI subscriptions and extra API fees.
"I burned a lot of tokens on this, on my Github Copilot subscription, OpenAI subscription, and Anthropic subscription," he said. "Due to the deadlines I ended up paying API rates for some of it, which was painful." (~£175).
His award could have been higher. "Before the hearing, SSE offered me more than the court ultimately awarded, conditional on confidentiality and non-disparagement clauses," Hopkins said. "I refused because it was more important to be able to tell people what they had done."
The judge hearing the case – shared with The Register – said Hopkins, who sought the intercession of an Energy Ombudsman after repeated communication with SSE, could not have done more to make clear that he was not liable for claimed debt.
"The defendant has subjected Mr Hopkins to a rollercoaster ride and not a good one," the judge said, adding, "pursuing Mr Hopkins for that liability, if continued, would amount to harassment."
Yet even after Hopkins won, the billing contniued. Following the judgement on July 17, another bill datedJuly 23 went out.
"Since the judgment…in direct contradiction to the ruling which stated any further attempts to claim the invalid debt from me would constitute harassment, they have sent me another bill with payment demand," Hopkins told The Register .
He's unsure whether he will pursue a harassment claim.
"This dragged on for nearly three years and cost hundreds of hours, lost sleep, and time that should have gone into my medical-research doctorate at Oxford," he said. "My exhibits alone were over 100 pages. Given how difficult this was, I struggle to see how people less academic than me wouldn't end up with CCJs and ruined credit ratings over debts they never owed."
Hopkin's doctoral funding ended before he could finish his degree, a delay he attributes to time spent on this case. So he has launched a funding campaign to support the completion of his doctorate.
The Register emailed SSE seeking comment and received an autoreply indicating that that SSE media team was unavailable outside of business hours in the UK. The urgent inquiry number yielded a representative who indicated that he only handled questions about outages. If company representatives reply after returning to the office, we'll update this story. ®
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