AI tools have become a hit with lawyers. But judges have shown they have little patience for when their experiments with the tech go wrong.
When combing over a document submitted by two defense lawyers from the firm Cozen O'Connor, district judge David Hardy found at least 14 citations of case law that appeared to be fictitious, Reuters reported. Others were misquoted or misrepresented.
After being confronted, the two defense lawyers soon pleaded guilty: one of them had used ChatGPT to draft and edit the document.
Where other judges have sanctioned lawyers for committing similar sins, judge Hardy offered a humiliating ultimatum last week that's borderline cruel and unusual.
The two stooges could pay $2,500 each in monetary sanctions, face removal from the case, and be referred to the state bar.
Or, instead, they could swallow their pride and write to their former law school deans and bar officials explaining how they screwed up — plus volunteer to speak on topics like AI and professional conduct.
In their shoes, we'd opt for option c): disappear off the face of the Earth.
The Cozen pair were representing Uprise, an internet service provider. The law firm apologized to the judge and explained that an associate Daniel Mann accidentally filed an early and uncorrected draft that was made with the help of ChatGPT, according to the reporting. Mann was fired, but the other lawyer, Jan Tomasik, appears to have stayed on.
Cozen told Reuters that it has a "strict and unambiguous" AI policy that bans publicly-available AI tools for client work, though apparently not specialized ones.
"We take this responsibility very seriously and violations of our policy have consequences," the firm said, per Reuters.
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