Extract from Trudy Knockless’s article “As AI Becomes Ubiquitous, Legal Departments’ Malpractice Risk Soars”
Dozens of lawyers have been sanctioned for filing documents with fake, AI-generated citations—a tally that should serve as a warning flare for in-house legal teams relying on AI without clear oversight or protocols.
Nick Tiger, associate general counsel at Pearl.com, an AI platform that provides answers to professional service questions, has spent much of his career immersed in legal tech—expects those numbers will continue to swell
In one recent example that garnered headlines internationally, an Alabama federal judge in July publicly reprimanded three lawyers with Butler Snow, the law firm hired to defend Alabama against lawsuits alleging its corrections officers used excessive force, after concluding they used OpenAI’s ChatGPT to produce a court filing with “completely made up” case citations. As part of Judge Anna Manasco’s order, she threw the Butler Snow lawyers off the case.
In a separate incident in Alabama, federal Judge Terry Moorer in October fined attorney James Johnson $5,000 for submitting fake AI-generated citations while representing a defendant in a high-profile drug case.
