Extract from Justin Furlong’s article “The Fallacy of the Calculator”
I really thought we were past this. After the Mata v. Avianca debacle nearly two years ago, which landed plaintiff’s counsel literally on the front page of The New York Times, I figured lawyers would be doubly and triply on their guard against (a) using general-purpose Generative AI for case research and (b) not checking the results to see if the cases they found actually existed.
But nope. In just the last couple of weeks, on five different occasions in the US, Canada, and England, lawyers submitted fake AI-generated caselaw to the courts. None of the judges was amused or inclined to cut the lawyers any slack, demanding that counsel in some cases show cause why they shouldn’t be held in contempt. And they were entirely right to do so. Lying to a judge — whether you intended to or not — is incredibly serious misconduct. (As Richard Moorhead correctly notes, these incidents aren’t AI problems — they’re lawyer competence problems.)
I’m not sure the legal profession appreciates just how bad this makes us look. Bringing lawsuits that cite non-existent cases leads the average person to regard lawyers as lazy, credulous, or completely indifferent to the truth. It says nothing good about our professionalism or even our basic competence. And that is not the brand you want to be carrying when an astonishing new technology, which can take over much of your work, is entering your market.
Why does this keep happening?
