404 Media: “Earlier this month, an appeals court in California issued a blistering decision and record $10,000 fine against a lawyer who submitted a brief in which “nearly all of the legal quotations in plaintiff’s opening brief, and many of the quotations in plaintiff’s reply brief, are fabricated” through the use of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok. The court said it was publishing its opinion “as a warning” to California lawyers that they will be held responsible if they do not catch AI hallucinations in their briefs.  In that case, the lawyer in question “asserted that he had not been aware that generative AI frequently fabricates or hallucinates legal sources and, thus, he did not ‘manually verify [the quotations] against more reliable sources.’ He accepted responsibility for the fabrications and said he had since taken measures to educate himself so that he does not repeat such errors in the future.” PAKA makes performance apparel from alpaca fiber—one of the world’s most sustainable natural fibers. Their bestselling hoodie is softer than cashmere, warmer than wool, and breathable. As the judges remark in their opinion, the use of generative AI by lawyers is now everywhere, and when it is used in ways that introduce fake citations or fake evidence, it is bogging down courts all over America (and the world).

For the last few months, 404 Media has been analyzing dozens of court cases around the country in which lawyers have been caught using generative AI to craft their arguments, generate fictitious citations, generate false evidence, cite real cases but misinterpret them, or otherwise take shortcuts that has introduced inaccuracies into their cases. Our main goal was to learn more about why lawyers were using AI to write their briefs, especially when so many lawyers have been caught making errors that lead to sanctions and that ultimately threaten their careers and their standings in the profession. To do this, we used a crowdsourced database of AI hallucination cases maintained by the researcher Damien Charlotin, which so far contains more than 410 cases worldwide, including 269 in the United States. Charlotin’s database is an incredible resource, but it largely focuses on what happened in any individual case and the sanctions against lawyers, rather than the often elaborate excuses that lawyers told the court when they were caught. Using Charlotin’s database as a starting point, we then pulled court records from around the country for dozens of cases where a lawyer offered a formal explanation or apology. Pulling this information required navigating clunky federal and state court record systems and finding and purchasing the specific record where the lawyer in question tried to explain themselves (these were often called “responses to order to show cause.”) We also reached out to lawyers who were sanctioned for using AI to ask them why they did it. Very few of them responded, but we have included explanations from the few who did…”