Reuters
A lawyer has asked a Virginia federal judge not to impose sanctions after he used incorrect case citations and quotes in a court filing, arguing the errors were unintentional and stemmed from “good-faith reliance” on artificial intelligence tools.
U.S. District Judge Thomas Cullen in Roanoke, Virginia, last month ordered plaintiffs’ lawyers in a whistleblower suit to explain why they should not be sanctioned for filing a document that he said included apparent “fictitious cases and made-up quotations.”
In a Monday filing in response, opens new tab, one of the lawyers facing sanctions, Thad Guyer, said the cases exist, but acknowledged “several miscitations and misquotations.”
Guyer, who represents a client suing federal contractor MSA Security, said in a separate declaration, opens new tab that an AI tool “miscited” two real cases that he included in his filing. When a separate legal AI tool did not find the cases through an automated check, Guyer said he searched for and found the names of both cases, and did not realize the citations were incorrect.
