UPDATE 1 — AI error — ridden court filings surge despite three years of sanctions

(Recasts headline) By Mike Scarcella WASHINGTON, Sept 18 (Reuters) — (Billable Hours is Reuters' weekly report on lawyers and money. Please send tips or suggestions to ) In a span of three days this month, a defense lawyer was rebuked for filing fabricated police witness testimony in a New Mexico murder case, prosecutors in Oklahoma disclosed that a judge's order there had cited fake cases, and a lawyer representing State Farm in Los Angeles was fined for erroneous citations across seven court filings.

The materials in each case were produced using generative AI, adding to a mountain of made-up, misquoted, misleading or incorrectly cited legal filings since the technology debuted on a mass scale in 2022. Three years after the first US court sanction over AI-generated errors, the number of attorneys admitting they used AI carelessly keeps growing, with AI errors now seeping into court opinions, expert testimony and prosecutors' briefs. "You would have thought that the legal profession — armed with awareness that hallucinations can happen — would be more vigilant," said US District Judge P.

Kevin Castel in Manhattan, whose 2023 order sanctioning lawyers for citing fake ChatGPT-generated cases became the profession's earliest warning. ” But "as the problem continues without abatement, the need for sanctions that are a greater deterrent grows," he said. AI "hallucinations" have now surfaced in at least 1,395 cases in US state and federal courts, according to a researcher tracking the cases on his website. Lawyers are generally not prohibited from using AI, but they are bound by ethics rules to verify the accuracy of their court submissions.

After a lawyer in New Mexico cited fabricated witnesses and made-up police testimony in his client's murder appeal, justices on the state's Supreme Court at a hearing last month expressed exasperation that attorneys were still failing to vet their AI research. “My 13-year-old nephew knows about hallucinations,” Justice C. Shannon Bacon had told the defense lawyer. " Mark McKenna, co-director of the UCLA Institute of Technology, Law & Policy, blamed a mix of factors as contributing to the growing number of errors: a competitive rush among law firms to adopt AI, pressure to deliver work quickly and AI marketing that he said downplays risks.

“Lawyers keep making the judgment that the upside is better than the downside,” McKenna said. The sanctions that lawyers have faced range from warnings and formal rebukes to monetary penalties in the hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars. Some judges have referred lawyers to state bar authorities to consider their compliance with professional ethics rules. 99 after generative AI produced a series of inaccurate citations and quotations.

"I accept full responsibility for my erroneous citations and make no excuses and express my deepest and sincerest apologies to the court," the lawyer had told the court. ” AI errors in judicial rulings have been rarer but have raised particular alarms. " In the Oklahoma case last week, a judge told a state investigator he had used an AI program for research and that an order he drafted contained two citations to non-existent cases. A lawyer for the judge said they were declining to comment.

Also on Billable Hours' radar this week... — Our legal industry columnist Sara Randazzo looks at what's driving the soaring pay for star recruits, and how those investments might be leading firms to take risks they otherwise wouldn't have in the past. — A senior Burford Capital executive and a former business partner have launched an AI-focused law firm for employment disputes and negotiations, joining a growing number of firms built around artificial intelligence.

— Also on the AI front: national plaintiffs firm Morgan & Morgan is touting its planned $1 billion investment in AI and technology over the next decade and next year will begin marketing its own AI platform to other law firms. — Conservative attorney John Eastman asked the US Supreme Court to reinstate his California law license after his disbarment over his efforts helping Donald Trump contest his 2020 presidential election loss. )