A hot potato: A recent insolvency case in London has become a test for how far connected wearables can intrude into courtroom procedure, after a judge found that a claimant was being coached in real time via a pair of smart glasses linked to his smartphone. The episode shows how ordinary consumer hardware – microphones, speakers, Bluetooth, and always-on connectivity – can be repurposed to feed answers into a witness box in a way that is hard to detect – until something goes wrong.
The dispute itself was unremarkable. The Insolvency and Companies Court was hearing a claim brought by Lithuanian firm UAB Business Enterprise and Laimonas Jakštys over who owned and controlled Oneta Limited. Jakštys was seeking a declaration that he and UAB Business Enterprise owned Oneta, rectification of the company's register, and his reinstatement as a director, and he gave evidence through a Lithuanian interpreter in the High Court in London.
What drew judicial attention was not the structure of the financing or the cross-border corporate issues, but the way he appeared to be answering questions.
According to the written judgment, ICC Judge Raquel Agnello KC noticed early in cross-examination that Jakštys frequently paused before responding to questions that were being interpreted for him. Those pauses became long enough that defense counsel Sarah Walker raised a concern that she could hear interference from the area around the witness and asked that he remove his glasses, noting that smart glasses capable of audio communication exist.
The Lithuanian interpreter then reported that she could hear voices apparently emanating from the glasses themselves, prompting the judge to identify them as smart glasses and to direct that they be removed.
Judge Agnello records that, after the glasses were removed and while the interpreter was in the middle of translating another question, Jakštys' mobile phone suddenly began broadcasting a voice from his inner jacket pocket. The court noted that the audio was clearly of someone speaking to Jakštys, and ordered both the smartglasses and the handset be handed to his solicitor.
Jakštys denied receiving answers via the glasses, and he also denied that the glasses were connected to his mobile phone while he was giving evidence. The next day, he arrived in court wearing the smartglasses again and was told to turn them off.
He also claimed during the proceedings that his mobile phone had been stolen but was unable to provide a corroborating police report, even though call logs showed repeated incoming calls to the device.
The phone records indicated multiple calls from a contact saved under the name "abra kadabra," several of which coincided with periods when Jakštys was on the stand. When asked, he said "abra kadabra" referred to a taxi driver, but he could not explain why so many calls were made while he was giving evidence, responding instead that he could not remember – an answer the judge noted he had given frequently.
The pattern of repeated calls to a paired device during testimony, combined with the observed audio routing behaviour, led the court to conclude that he was being assisted or coached in real time.
In the written ruling, Judge Agnello found that the smartglasses were "clearly connected" to the mobile phone and that a call had been active during the cross-examination until the phone was physically removed.
She also concluded that his evidence was "unreliable and untruthful," not only because of the coaching but because she did not accept that the content of his witness statements reflected his own evidence. As a result, she rejected his evidence in its entirety, treating the coaching as a fundamental breach of the integrity of the process rather than a peripheral irregularity.
When pressed to explain why a voice had been heard from his phone after he took off the glasses, Jakštys suggested the source was ChatGPT. The judge dismissed that explanation as lacking credibility, given what had occurred in court and the timing of the calls.
The judgment did not attempt to identify who was on the other end of the line, treating that as unnecessary once the existence of coaching was established from the device behaviour and his responses.
For courts now routinely dealing with video links, multilingual witnesses, and AI-based tools in the background, this kind of incident illustrates how basic digital forensics – understanding call logs, Bluetooth pairing, and audio paths – can become part of the assessment of credibility.
Outside the courtroom, similar consumer smartglasses have already turned up in other contested contexts, from immigration enforcement operations to student experiments with facial recognition overlays. Those uses have focused attention on their cameras, microphones, and the possibility of live identification or recording; this London case shows that even without any advanced AI running on the glasses themselves, simple voice connectivity can be enough to compromise a formal proceeding.