When a US judge found fabricated quotes in a lawyer’s brief earlier this year, the attorney admitted he had used Claude, an artificial intelligence chatbot, to write the document.<\/p>\n
That got him a fine and a mandatory course on how to use AI properly.<\/p>\n
But this case was just one in a rising tide of AI “hallucinations” muddying the legal waters. Now some courts are trying to stem the tide by cracking down on the lawyers concerned.<\/p>\n
It was judge Jerry Edwards Jr., of Louisiana district court, who sanctioned the lawyer in that recent US case last month. He found the AI-generated hallucinations while reviewing a motion to block evidence from being admitted in a personal injury case.<\/p>\n
He caught seven quotes attributed to previous court rulings that either did not appear in the original decisions or had been misrepresented.<\/p>\n
The hapless lawyer said a law clerk had caught other fabricated quotes in a first draft. Instead of learning from his mistake however, the attorney simply asked Claude to correct the errors — then submitted the brief without reviewing it.<\/p>\n
The attorney had believed the AI’s output was accurate, said the court’s May 18 memorandum order announcing the sanctions.<\/p>\n
“Ignorance of the risks of AI usage is no longer an excuse,” the judge wrote, fining the lawyer $1,000 and sending him on a three-hour course on AI-assisted legal practice.<\/p>\n
But he at least granted part of the motion.<\/p>\n
– Hundreds of cases –<\/p>\n
AI-generated blunders do not necessarily destroy a lawyer’s case, French lawyer Damien\u00a0Charlotin told AFP.<\/p>\n
“The lawyer’s credibility is in tatters — but there are cases where lawyers still win, despite the hallucinations, because they were right on the merits,” he explained.<\/p>\n
But there are other issues.<\/p>\n
Judge Linda Kevins of New York State’s Supreme Court warned in a January ruling that such blunders wasted the time and money of both the opposing party and the court.<\/p>\n
In addition, she said, they were “potentially harming the reputation of judges and courts whose names are falsely invoked as authors of the bogus opinions”.<\/p>\n
Charlotin has been compiling a database of court documents containing AI hallucinations since April 2023.<\/p>\n
So far, he has 1,600 examples from 35 countries: from fabricated quotes and cases, to plagiarised arguments or references and out-of-date advice.<\/p>\n
Since it is a crowd-sourced database it cannot count as the definitive list, but by far the most cases — 1,116 of them — come from the United States.<\/p>\n
Next comes Canada, with 173 cases, Australia with 74, then Britain with 59.<\/p>\n
– ‘Do your job!’ –<\/p>\n
“In the legal field, AI is used for research, finding precedents, and sometimes generating text,” said Charlotin.<\/p>\n
Lawyers and litigants representing themselves who submitted documents containing AI hallucinations were most often using mainstream chatbots, particularly OpenAI’s ChatGPT.<\/p>\n
The data suggests that specialised legal AI tools, used by many law firms, are more reliable — but they are still not immune from hallucinations.<\/p>\n
“AI thrives on recognising patterns. And legal citations and arguments are always formatted in the same way, so it’s easy for an AI to follow a template and generate fake ones,” said Charlotin.<\/p>\n
“Because no lawyer knows all past cases, when a chatbot outputs something that looks like a law citation, the only way to know it actually exists is to check it,” he added.<\/p>\n
But some lawyers are still not doing that, said judge Scott Schlegel, who serves on the American Bar Association’s Task Force on Law and Artificial Intelligence.<\/p>\n
Too many attorneys still do not understand the technology’s limits, he told AFP. Time pressures are compounding the problem, Charlotin’s database shows.<\/p>\n
But that’s no excuse, Schlegel told AFP in February.<\/p>\n
“At this point, I just can’t understand how we still have the issue. Just do your job and read the cases. Come on!”<\/p>\n
– Sanctions –<\/p>\n
According to Charlotin’s data, hallucinations in court filings have increased eightfold in the past year compared with the previous 12 months.<\/p>\n
He is testing his own AI-powered tool to help lawyers spot hallucinations before they are submitted to courts. But he cannot guarantee it will not itself make mistakes.<\/p>\n
“It’s still up to the lawyers to adapt their verification process to the issues at hand,” he said.<\/p>\n
Databases such as Court Listener\u00a0have a growing list of rulings on AI-generated calamities in the US courts. And in several such cases, judges are handing out more than just reprimands.<\/p>\n
Last week, federal judge Sharion Aycock sanctioned lawyers on both sides of a civil case in Mississippi after they submitted AI-assisted legal briefs that cited non-existent cases.<\/p>\n
Four lawyers were fined $8,000 in total, and two of them were barred from appearing in the Mississippi Northern District Court\u00a0for two years.<\/p>\n
“In an era of rampant unverified AI usage within the legal field, this case presents a prime example of the risk associated with serving as a rubberstamp when acting as local counsel”, she wrote in the sanctions order.<\/p>\n
lmc\/jwp\/jj\/rmb\/abs<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When a US judge found fabricated quotes in a lawyer’s brief earlier this year, the attorney admitted he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":73852,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,2720,25,40702,40699,19255,40698,40701,40703,40700],"class_list":["post-73851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-ai-hallucinations","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-charlotin","tag-court-rulings","tag-hallucinations","tag-legal-briefs","tag-legal-field","tag-louisiana-district-court","tag-personal-injury-case"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73851"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73851\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/73852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}