It was discovered that a lawyer was using AI while explaining in court the reason for using AI

In a New York court, a lawyer was found to have used AI to prepare and file documents. The lawyer was reprimanded for using AI and was sanctioned, but it was discovered that he also used AI when fighting the sanctions.

Lawyer Caught Using AI While Explaining to Court Why He Used AI

A lawyer representing a defendant in a lawsuit over financial disputes within a family submitted several documents in rebuttal to the plaintiff's claims. However, the documents were found to contain citations from fictitious documents and literature, raising suspicions that AI may have been used.

The plaintiff and his lawyer reported the defendant's alleged use of AI to the court and requested that it be addressed. The defendant's lawyer, who submitted a response as ordered by the court, neither admitted nor denied the use of AI, instead providing vague answers such as, 'We acknowledge that several passages were unintentionally enclosed in quotation marks,' and 'These quotations were intended as a paraphrase or summary of the source material.'

Judge Joel Cohen, who presided over the case, wrote that 'certainly, some of the citations happened to be correct legal interpretations,' but that there was no doubt that false precedents had been cited, and issued a motion for sanctions against the defense lawyers. He pointed out that 'if the use of AI becomes commonplace, it creates the risk that false precedents will infiltrate the judiciary and take up court time.'

The defense attorneys filed a motion opposing the sanctions, but it was discovered that the motion also cited non-existent documents, and the number of false or incorrect citations in the motion was more than double the number in the document in which the defense attorneys were first cited for AI use.

The defendant's lawyers explained that they trusted the documents prepared by their lawyers and did not verify each and every one of them, but Judge Cohen did not accept this. The plaintiffs also requested the defendants to pay additional legal fees incurred in reviewing the defendants' documents, and Judge Cohen accepted this.

In recent years, AI-generated 'hallucinations' have increasingly entered the legal arena, posing a serious challenge to the legal profession. Lawyers whose use of AI is revealed in court documents often offer the excuse that 'we didn't expect the AI to make a mistake,' but as is well known, AI can make mistakes. Lawyers who blindly trust AI without understanding how it works often face fines.

Lawyer fined $5,500 for generating non-existent precedents using AI, told to 'require further education' - GIGAZINE