You don’t have to look far to find a story about the valuable use cases of LLMs in legal work. For example, intelligent use of AI can reduce the time spent on tedious tasks, allowing you to focus more on the truly “legal” part of your job. Unfortunately, that can’t stop you from being a dunce. After a period of lax adoption, lawyers find themselves squarely in the latter part of the fuck-and-find era. Word to the wise: learn from their mistakes before a judge burns a few thousand dollars in your pocket too. New York Daily Record has a cover:
A New York state appeals court has ordered monetary penalties totaling $10,500 against an attorney and his law firm after the attorney submitted a brief in a civil trial that contained false quotes apparently generated by an artificial intelligence tool.
The Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court, Second Department, ordered attorney Michael Sanders to pay $8,000 and his firm to pay $2,500 to the New York State Lawyers’ Client Protection Fund.
…
Sanders submitted a brief “prepared with the assistance of generative artificial intelligence, containing citations to nonexistent cases, purported fictitious citations from the Court of Appeals completely contrary to current law, and misrepresentations of what certain actual cases actually led to or decided,” LaSalle wrote.
If the ethical obligations of doing your job well aren’t strict enough, I’m all for hitting lawyers in their pockets. Making sure the cases you cite 1) are real and 2) actually do the things you say they do is not a high bar and I’m glad we’re starting to see less coddling when it comes to holding lawyers accountable for their poor service. There’s a reason why your clients pay you to do the lawyer’s work rather than simply taking their problems to Claude to figure out where to go next. If you claim to be a lawyer when you are really just an LLM intermediary in a lawsuit, this will and should reduce the client’s confidence that you are actually doing what you claim to charge.
The good news is that Sanders readily admitted his mistakes. We hope this is the last time he finds himself in such a situation. Even better, we hope his story is the kick in the shin that everyone needs to revisit their quotes. Remember: if authority seems a little too good to be true, it very well may be.
Lawyer and law firm sanctioned for AI errors in court filing (New York Daily Record)
Chris Williams became Social Media Manager and Associate Editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Before joining the team, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Law School Memes for Edgy T14s Facebook group. He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University Law School in St. Louis. He is a former boat builder who is learning to swim and is interested in rhetoric, Spinozists and humor. Getting back into cycling wouldn’t hurt either. You can reach him by email at (email protected) and by Tweet/Bluesky at @WritesForRent.
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