Legal Dive write
Attorney Steven A. Schwartz first landed him and his colleague Peter LoDuca in hot water with a federal judge through his use of ChatGPT for legal research, which resulted in six fake cases being cited in a legal brief.
However, if the two Levidow, Levidow & Oberman lawyers had owned up to Schwartz’s now-infamous actions sooner, they might have been able to avoid the sanctions Judge P. Kevin Castel handed down last week.
The Southern District of New York judge wrote that “the narrative leading to sanctions” included an early March filing that was prepared by Schwartz and filed by LoDuca that first cited the fake cases.
“But if the matter had ended with Respondents coming clean about their actions shortly after they received the defendant’s March 15 brief questioning the existence of the cases, or after they reviewed the Court’s Orders of April 11 and 12 requiring production of the cases, the record now would look quite different,” Castel wrote in his ruling.
“Instead, the individual Respondents doubled down and did not begin to dribble out the truth until May 25, after the Court issued an Order to Show Cause why one of the individual Respondents ought not be sanctioned,” Castel continued. “For reasons explained and considering the conduct of each individual Respondent separately, the Court finds bad faith on the part of the individual Respondents based upon acts of conscious avoidance and false and misleading statements to the Court.”
The judge levied a $5,000 fine against the two attorneys and their firm in light of the Rule 11 violations. The lawyers were also directed to send Castel’s opinion to the judges to whom the generative AI tool improperly attributed the fake decisions.
Read more at https://www.legaldive.com/news/chatgpt-lawyer-fake-cases-lawyer-uses-chatgpt-sanctions-generative-ai/653925/
