You don’t have to go far to find a story on the valuable use cases of LLMs in legal work. For example, smart use of AI can reduce your time spent doing grunt work, freeing you up to focus more on the actually “legal” part of your job. Unfortunately, it cannot stop you from being a dunce. After a lax period of adoption, attorneys are finding themselves squarely in the latter part of the fuck around and find out era. Word to the wise — learn from their mistakes before a judge burns a couple thousand dollar hole in your pocket too. NY Daily Record has coverage:
A New York state appeals court has ordered monetary sanctions totaling $10,500 for an attorney and his law firm after the attorney submitted a brief in a civil lawsuit that contained fake citations apparently generated by an artificial intelligence tool.
The Appellate Division of state Supreme Court, Second Department, ordered attorney Michael Sanders to pay $8,000 and his firm to pay $2,500 to the Lawyers’ Fund for Client Protection of the State of New York.
…
Sanders submitted a brief “prepared with the assistance of generative artificial intelligence, containing citations to nonexistent cases, fictitious purported Court of Appeals quotations wholly contrary to actual law, and misrepresentations about what certain real cases actually held or decided,” LaSalle wrote.
If ethical obligations to do your job well aren’t strong enough, I’m all for hitting lawyers in their pockets. Ensuring that the cases you cite 1) are real, and 2) actually hold the things you say they do is not a high bar and I’m glad we’re starting to see less coddling when it comes to holding attorneys accountable for underserving their clients. There’s a reason your clients are paying you to do the work of lawyering rather than just throwing their problems into Claude to figure out where to go next. If you’re proclaiming to be a lawyer when you’re actually just an LLM middleman in a suit, it will and should lower client trust that you’re actually doing what you claim to be billing for.
The good news is that Sanders readily owned up to his mistakes. We hope this is the last time he finds himself in trouble like this. Stronger still, we hope that his story will be the kick in the shin everyone else needs to go over their cites. Remember: if the authority looks a little too good to be true, it very well may be.
Attorney And Law Firm Sanctioned For AI Mistakes In Court Filing [NY Daily Record]
Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s . He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boat builder who is learning to swim and is interested in rhetoric, Spinozists and humor. Getting back in to cycling wouldn’t hurt either. You can reach him by email at christopherrashadwilliams@gmail.com and by Tweet/Bluesky at @WritesForRent.
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