Georgia Court Throws Out Earlier Ruling That Relied on Fake Cases Made Up By AI (theregister.com) 39
The Georgia Court of Appeals has overturned a trial court's order after finding it relied on court cases that do not exist, apparently generated by AI. The appellate court vacated the ruling in a divorce case involving Nimat Shahid's challenge to a divorce order granted to her husband Sufyan Esaam in July 2022.
"We are troubled by the citation of bogus cases in the trial court's order," the appeals court stated in its decision, which directs the lower court to revisit Shahid's petition. The court noted the errant citations appear to have been "drafted using generative AI" and were included in an order prepared by attorney Diana Lynch.
Lynch repeated the fabricated citations in her appeals briefs and expanded upon them after Shahid had challenged the fictitious cases. The appeals court found Lynch's briefs contained "11 bogus case citations out of 15 total, one of which was in support of a frivolous request for attorney fees." The court fined Lynch $2,500 for filing the frivolous motion.
"We are troubled by the citation of bogus cases in the trial court's order," the appeals court stated in its decision, which directs the lower court to revisit Shahid's petition. The court noted the errant citations appear to have been "drafted using generative AI" and were included in an order prepared by attorney Diana Lynch.
Lynch repeated the fabricated citations in her appeals briefs and expanded upon them after Shahid had challenged the fictitious cases. The appeals court found Lynch's briefs contained "11 bogus case citations out of 15 total, one of which was in support of a frivolous request for attorney fees." The court fined Lynch $2,500 for filing the frivolous motion.
Disbar (Score:5, Insightful)
Any lawyer introducing fake case citations into the court should have their license suspended for a year, on the first offense. They should be disbarred entirely for a second offense.
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You won't find lawyers prepared to disbar other ambulance chasers over such such a "triviality". I wonder if the other lawyer (or his/her paralegal) should have noticed, that would have killed the case then and there.
Re: Disbar (Score:3)
I thought that lying to the judge was a serious offense for a lawyer. I know cops get put on a special list if they a repeatedly found to lie to judges.
I guess laws don't apply the same for the folks in the system vs common folks. So much for We The People.
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I thought judges were supposed to CHECK what cases lawyer cite.
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Courts make law all the time. It's a standard feature of our legal system.
You can read more about it here:
https://scholarlycommons.law.c... [case.edu]
Re: Disbar (Score:4, Interesting)
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I thought that lying to the judge was a serious offense for a lawyer.
But did the lawyer intentionally lie, or was she lazy and incompetent, delusionally trusting in the AI info? Of course, neither deceit nor incompetence are good, but they perhaps deserve different punishments and remedies.
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No they don't.
Your job as a lawyer filing a brief is to correctly cite cases. Period. Your failure to do so is your failure to do so, whether that failure is caused by deceit, laziness, or incompetence.
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Whether it was intentional or not only factor in whether the lawyer should be brought up on charges.
Both intentionally citing bad cases or doing so out of gross incompetence are both disqualifications for doing that job. At the very minimum I'd expect the lawyer to be unable to practice until she's demonstrated she understands the level of seriousness this fault entailed, and undergoes training to ensure she doesn't do it in future. A one year suspension seems like it should be the minimum.
The clients of la
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No need. Just increase the punishment. Right now the punishment is usually just a failed filing and attorney's fees (you wasted time and money of opposition). Just start demanding that the first person found using AI to lose the case. If you're the plaintiff, you lose and pay the defense their entire attorney's fees plus damages for bringing the defense through the hassle of a lawsuit. Add in punitive damages as well to discourage the behavior.
Likewise for the defense.
The threat of an instant-win should cau
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Any lawyer introducing fake case citations into the court should have their license suspended for a year, on the first offense. They should be disbarred entirely for a second offense.
I have lots of friends who are lawyers and they explain things to me about the legal system. The legal system is very hesitant about punishing lawyers for anything. So the $2,500 fine, which to us non-lawyers is a joke, is probably about as "tough" as they are going to get. Almost nobody gets disbarred or seriously punished no matter how bad they were.
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Apparently the court didn't check either (Score:3)
Everybody's piling on the lawyers (as they should). But apparently the court itself accepted the citations without checking them.
What does this tell us about court cases over decades, where human lawyers cited supporting court cases and documents that may or may not have had anything to do with their argument?
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Everybody's piling on the lawyers (as they should). But apparently the court itself accepted the citations without checking them.
What does this tell us about court cases over decades, where human lawyers cited supporting court cases and documents that may or may not have had anything to do with their argument?
Judges are supposed to have clerks working for them. These are usually just out of law school graduates who have the ability to do exactly what you suggest - check the citations to make sure they actually exist and apply to the case on hand. Could be that the judge's clerk was too lazy to check and expected to get away with it. If the judge didn't have a clerk, then it's up to the judge to check.
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Judges are supposed to have clerks working for them. These are usually just out of law school graduates who have the ability to do exactly what you suggest
For higher courts like SCOTUS, they get clerks who are lawyers and are part of their legal training. However such clerks are not common especially for courts likes one which would handle a state divorce. The clerks at this level are purely administrative clerks. They handle the schedules of hearings and cases, they receive and mark the filings, etc. These clerks do not look at the filings in detail.
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Sounds like they could've used an AI to vet the cases. Maybe even just replace the Judge as well.
"The humans are hereby sentenced to live as robots!"
Not a lot of people paying attention apparently (Score:4, Interesting)
It's pretty wild how many people had to fuck up in order for this to get all the way to the Appeals Court.
1. The lawyer filing the original submission.
2. The filing lawyers' staff (assistants, paralegals, maybe a junior lawyer or articling student) who participated in the drafting.
3. The opposing lawyer.
4. The opposing lawyers' staff, insofar as any were instructed to review it.
5. The judge.
6. The judge's support staff, insofar as anyone was supporting on this case.
Honestly, that's a lot of people and parties to the matter that just aren't really paying that much attention. Personally, if I was either of the individuals hiring these lawyers, I'd consider firing them and going after them for malpractice as a very real option, and at the very least I would expect to not have to pay for anything that came about as a result of this nonsense.
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It's pretty wild how many people had to fuck up in order for this to get all the way to the Appeals Court. . .
. .
2. The filing lawyers' staff (assistants, paralegals, maybe a junior lawyer or articling student) who participated in the drafting.
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6. The judge's support staff, insofar as anyone was supporting on this case.
Generally assistants and paralegals may not have any part of false citations. They would be more involved with the processes than anything else. It is mostly on the lawyers who signed the filings. Any work submitted under their name is a reflection on them.
Also what did you responsibility do you expect of the judge's support staff? The judge's clerk and court reporter do very little research or look at the filings in detail. They are generally more involved with the processes like scheduling hearings, pro
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Generally assistants and paralegals may not have any part of false citations. They would be more involved with the processes than anything else. It is mostly on the lawyers who signed the filings. Any work submitted under their name is a reflection on them.
It is 100% the lawyer who did the filing's responsibility, but it is entirely within the realm of possibility that the initial research and/or draft filing was prepared entirely by a Paralegal or Legal Assistant. They may even have been the one using the AI in the first place. At law, it's all on the Lawyer, but in principle, a Paralegal who prepares a draft filing that includes fabricated citations is not without blame (and likely not without a stern rebuke or termination back at the office). Plus, I was m
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3. The opposing lawyer.
Pretty sure the opposing lawyer caught it and brought it up, which is why it was in the appeal in the first place. They just were not able to convince the judge in time for the original claim. Many of these kinds of things were probably cited in various fillings with limited time to respond (some things have less than 7 days to respond, which does not give enough time to dig down to all the citations, and may only provoke a more generic response that they could not find the case/reference).
So something I don't think anyone is asking (Score:3)
The AI should be smart enough to know what a citation is and it probably is. So it probably knows what it can cite and what it can't.
So if you haven't figured out where I'm going with this it's that there are probably a shitload of cases that have fake citations in them that have never been caught.
The AI is probably getting caught because it's picking up too many fakes citations because people are telling the AIs to find something that justifies what they want to do and then the AI finds it and puts it in the brief.
So I wouldn't be surprised in the least if you could take the data set used to train the AI here and then find the original documents and find a actual court case with fake citations in it.
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Your model of an AI is wrong. EVERYTHING an AI says is a "hallucination", it's just that a lot of those hallucinations match reality. Even "Stocastic Parrot" is closer to correct than "An AI just regurgitates what it finds in its data set".
(P.S.: Most of your memories are wrong. They're also "hallucinations" that sort of "match reality". One test of this is to list everything that's in a room you haven't been in for awhile (say at least 10 minutes) and where in the room it was located. Then go to the
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So yeah it is possible but a lot of these are hallucinations but I'd still bet money that a lot of them come from real Court filings.
But you know you're probably right, lawyers are far too honest to put made up citations in there briefings right?
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The AI should be smart enough to know what a citation is and it probably is. So it probably knows what it can cite and what it can't.
I would be surprised if a company like Lexis Nexis doesn't already have an LLM product trained specifically on case law that can produce accurate responses. I would be less surprised if a law firm used ChatGPT free tier instead of paying the money for right tool for the job.
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The AI should be smart enough to know what a citation is
Why would you think that? I thought you knew something about this technology.
3 years of a couple's life waiting for a divorce (Score:1)
Don't forget that these false filings may have delayed a divorce by 3 years.
Why doesn't this exist? (Score:1)
Submit a brief to a software application.
The application locates all cases cited, checks them against a database, and provides a report with a summary of each case cited (flagging bullshit citations in the process).
How can that not exist already???
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There's probably no standard format for the input data. It's already been claimed that Google could have checked if the cases exist. (I've never tried, so that *could* be wrong.)
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Legal filings have a fairly standard format, but even otherwise, it's pretty easy to pick out "Party A vs Party B" anywhere in the document.
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Legal filings have a fairly standard format, but even otherwise, it's pretty easy to pick out "Party A vs Party B" anywhere in the document.
While filings have a fairly standard format, citations can be from multiple sources which may have different formats. In the case Mata v Avianca [justia.com] where ChatGPT fabricated cases, the AI cited the following cases:
The first two did not exist but the last two do e
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The first two did not exist but the last two do exist but had nothing to do with the topic cited. It would still take a human to determine that these cases where bogus citations.
If you gave an LLM access to a legal database, not training it on it but allowing it to pull things from it, then you should be able to use it to check citations. It should be able to handle both looking things up and reporting null results, and also summarizing those cases it does find and doing a better-than-nothing job of reporting whether they were cited correctly.
If I were a lawyer I wouldn't trust such a thing to check my citations, but I would absolutely use it to look for low-hanging fruit in my opp
automation? (Score:2)
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