LLM v LLM
A US judge has cancelled a trial and sanctioned lawyers on both sides after finding that their filings cited cases AI had invented.
The order, handed down by judge Sharion Aycock in the Northern District of Mississippi, stemmed from a contract dispute in which a lawyer was suing the City of Aberdeen (not the one in Scotland) over unpaid legal fees.
It should be noted that the lawyer was not running his own case but had instructed a legal team to act for him, though given how things turned out, he might well wish he hadn’t bothered.
That is because, when the court tried to verify the authorities cited by his lawyers, it found that several did not exist. It soon emerged that the city’s lawyers had done the same, using AI to research and draft their filings and falling foul of hallucinations of their own, with neither side having checked the output before filing it with the court.
“This case presents the Court with an unusual scenario — attorneys for both litigants engaged in similar sanctionable conduct,” Aycock wrote, adding that the court was yet again burdened with “addressing AI hallucinations in court filings”.
The two lawyers who drafted the offending documents, one from each side, received the heaviest sanctions. Both had their permission to appear in the court revoked, were barred from appearing before the court for two years, and were fined $2,500 and $3,500 respectively.
The judge found they had acted in “bad faith”, writing that a lawyer’s duty to verify their work “is absolute” and “cannot be outsourced to technology or delegated to co-counsel”.
The remaining pair were disqualified from the case and fined $1,000 each. The judge wrote that the case presented “a prime example of the risk associated with serving as a rubberstamp when acting as local counsel”.
With all four lawyers removed, the trial was cancelled and the proceedings paused to give the now-unrepresented parties time to instruct new counsel, or risk having the claim dismissed.
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