Levidow, Levidow & Oberman P.C.
A New York law firm files ChatGPT-invented court cases and is sanctioned $5,000
In March 2023 lawyers at a New York firm cited court decisions that did not exist in a federal brief, after using ChatGPT for legal research. In June 2023 the judge found bad faith, imposed a $5,000 penalty and ordered the lawyers to write to the client and to the judges named.
Key figures
Copied exactly from the sources. Copy any figure with its citation.
$5,000
Penalty imposed jointly and severally on the two lawyers and the firm1
a month and a half
How long the lawyers kept defending the fake cases after the court first questioned them, per the Steptoe blog2
What it took
Cost, team size and timeline were not disclosed in the sources.
The problem
A lawyer at a New York firm needed case law for a personal-injury claim against an airline. The firm mainly works in state courts and used a research service with limited access to federal cases. He turned to ChatGPT, which he had not used before and wrongly believed to be a kind of search engine.
What they built
Nothing custom. The lawyer used the public ChatGPT chatbot to ask for case law supporting his argument. It produced descriptions of cases that did not exist, including invented quotes and citations.
How they did it
The firm filed the brief on March 1, 2023, citing those cases. The airline's lawyers said on March 15 they could not find them. The court ordered the firm to produce the decisions, and the firm submitted excerpts, one of which the judge described as bordering on nonsensical. Only on May 25, after an order to show cause, did one lawyer admit that ChatGPT had been the source.
What went wrong
The court found bad faith from the two individual lawyers, based on conscious avoidance and false and misleading statements to the court. The firm was held jointly responsible because no exceptional circumstances applied. The judge listed the harms of fake citations: the other side wastes time exposing them, the court loses time, the client may lose real arguments, and the names of real judges are falsely used.
Results
On June 22, 2023 the court imposed a penalty of $5,000, paid into the court's registry. It also ordered letters to the client and to each judge falsely named as the author of a fake opinion, but refused to compel an apology. In weighing the need for deterrence, the judge took into account the significant publicity the case had generated.
Lessons for your project
Require a person to open and read every cited source before anything is filed. A chatbot can produce invented references that look real.
Write an AI-use policy for professional staff that names which tools are allowed for research and who checks the output.
If an error is found, disclose it at once. The judge said the record would have looked different had the lawyers come clean early.
Do not treat asking the chatbot whether its answer is real as verification. In this case the same tool kept confirming the fake cases.
Caveats
- The firm's research service had limited access to federal cases, which the lawyer gave as the reason he turned to ChatGPT. This is the lawyer's own testimony, as recorded by the court.
- The court opinion is the primary record. The Steptoe SDNY blog page was read through an archived copy because the live page blocked automated access.
- The judge noted that the use of an AI tool is not improper in itself. The failure was the lack of checking and the later false and misleading statements.
- The deployed date is the month of the first brief that cited the fake cases (1 March 2023); the sources do not say when the research with ChatGPT took place.
- This is a professional's use of a public chatbot, not an enterprise deployment, and no business results are reported.
Sources
- Mata v. Avianca, Inc., Opinion and Order on Sanctions, 22-cv-1461 (PKC)
US District Court, Southern District of New York · 2023-06-22 · Filing · storage.courtlistener.com
- Judge Castel Sanctions Lawyers Who Submitted Fake Cases Generated By ChatGPT
Steptoe SDNY Blog · 2023-06-28 · News · sdnyblog.com
Summarized in our own words from the sources above. Spotted an error? See corrections.