Linked In Commentary: ChatGPT hallucinations landed this law firm with $50,000 in sanctions. The Order is incredibly instructive – it’s a fascinating narrative of how lawyers’ processes are being exposed by the reality of AI.

ChatGPT hallucinations landed this law firm with $50,000 in sanctions.

The Order is incredibly instructive – it’s a fascinating narrative of how lawyers’ processes are being exposed by the reality of AI.

The details here matter as they go to the process issues: The underlying dispute was an evidentiary issue in a case over lead exposure – the judge in the case had ruled that certain evidence was inadmissible, and despite that ruling the defending counsel had repeatedly brought up this evidence to the jury (over repeated sustained objections and admonishments).

On appeal, defending counsel brought a motion arguing that the ruling barring this evidence was in error – and it was at this point in the process that a hallucinated case citation appeared, in the form of an on-point Supreme Court case going directly to the issue at hand that was wholly invented by AI.

It’s worth stressing: This case was central authority on a key issue of admissibility – and despite this, apparently no one on the defending legal team ever tried to look it up and read it.

It was introduced when one partner used ChatGPT in her contributions to the motion – the Order here implies that she didn’t check any of the citations because she both didn’t know that ChatGPT could make up cases, and she assumed that others on the team would check her work before it was filed. (It’s worth noting that this attorney had been sanctioned before for submitting fake case citations from ChatGPT, so her contention that she didn’t know it could make up cases is somewhat doubtful.)

Obviously, no one ever did, in fact, check her work – the signing attorney apparently deferred to another partner in the firm’s appellate practice for issues of law, and only read the motion as “final look-through.” He explicitly states that he “was not – nor was [he] expected to, nor did [he] expect [himself] to – cite check over 58 cases.”

But SOMEONE should have done so – if there was ever one single attorney who was asked to cite check the brief, it isn’t mentioned in the Order. The Order very much reads like everyone on the team was deferring to everyone else for the work of confirming the case citations, and no one was actually tasked with doing so.

This was manifestly a process failure – as much as the offending attorneys here talk about how “disgusting” they find the use of AI in drafting, the real offense here seems to be that not one single person on the legal team ever bothered to look up a case representing central authority on a key legal issue.

In addition to the $50K in sanctions imposed on the firm, at least one partner lost her job and had to pay $10,000 for her error. Check your citations.