As published in Fortune.. the AI legal info battles are in full swing – can the old guard head off the generalists at the pass. It’ll cost them a lot of money in advertorial
A growing number of AI-created flaws found in legal documents submitted to courts have brought attorneys under increased scrutiny.
Courts across the country have sanctioned attorneys for misuse of open-source LLMs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, which have made up “imaginary” cases, suggested that attorneys invent court decisions to strengthen their arguments, and provided improper citations to legal documents.
Experts tell Fortune more of these cases will crop up—and along with them steep penalties for the attorneys who misuse AI.
Damien Charlotin, a lawyer and research fellow at HEC Paris, runs a database of AI hallucination cases. He’s tallied 376 cases to date, 244 of which are U.S. cases.
“There is no denying that we were on an exponential curve,” he told Fortune.
Charlotin pointed out that attorneys can be particularly prone to oversights, as individuals in his profession delegate tasks to teams, oftentimes don’t read all of the material collected by coworkers, and copy and paste strings of citations without proper fact-checking methods. Now AI is making the practice more apparent as attorneys adjust to the new tech.
“We have a situation where these (open-source models) are making up the law,” Sean Fitzpatrick, LexisNexis North America, UK & Ireland CEO, told Fortune. “The stakes are getting higher, and that’s just on the attorney’s side.”
Fitzpatrick, a proponent of purpose-built AI applications for the legal market, admits the tech giants’ low-cost pilot chatbots are good for things like summarizing documents and writing emails. But for “real legal work” like drafting motions, the models “can’t do what lawyers need them to do,” Fitzpatrick said.
For example, drafting courtroom-ready documents for cases that could involve Medicaid coverage decisions, Social Security benefits, or criminal prosecutions cannot afford to have AI-created mistakes, he added.
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