- Mississippi judge takes a dim view of proceedings after it became clear that lawyers for both sides were using AI to make their arguments
- The sanctions order included fines, expungement and disqualification from the case in question for the lawyers involved.
- AI advice remains a somewhat tricky affair, given the lack of accountability and the model’s tendency to “hallucinate”
In what can be seen as a comical development that could be a sign of things to come, a US federal judge had to manually intervene and reprimand lawyers on both sides of the aisle after noticing they were using AI.
U.S. District Judge Sharion Aycock of the Northern District of Mississippi noted that this was not the first time her court had to address the issue of “the burden of addressing AI hallucinations in court records.”
The judge ordered a pause in the proceedings, throwing out the trial, while disqualifying the four attorneys involved in the current case and barring two of them from appearing in any capacity in the Northern District of Mississippi for two years.
An “insufficient and incredulous” justification
Although the case may have been a routine matter in the judge’s docket, dealing with a breach of contract claim over unpaid legal fees between the city of Aberdeen and a Louisiana attorney, Tom Withers III, some of the precedents cited in the argument never occurred, inviting scrutiny from the judge and possibly
His lawyer, Kathleen M. Wilson, used AI quotes to argue his position, a situation that was discovered when a court order required both sides to produce copies of the cases they had cited.
The city of Aberdeen, represented by Kathryn Y. Williams, was also found guilty of a similar infraction: citing a nonexistent 1971 Mississippi Supreme Court decision and references to three other federal decisions that could not be reproduced.
Both lawyers admitted to using AI while claiming ignorance of the potential of the LLMs they employed, sometimes hallucinating. The judge took a dim view of the entire case, however, noting that one of the attorneys had been practicing using generative AI to draft his briefs without supervision for at least six months, and that they had already been warned against the practice in an unrelated case.
The judge noted that she “finds this explanation insufficient and incredulous” and fined the four lawyers a total of $8,000, singling out the two lawyers who used AI.
The case, however, marks an important ruling that could, ironically, serve as real precedent against AI-generated hallucinations that have gotten lawyers into trouble: Ignorance of AI hallucinations is not a viable legal defense.
Via 404 Media
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