Leading Federal Criminal Defense Lawyer Points Out Continued Dangers Of Relying Upon AI Legal Research. Both lawyers and non-lawyers alike have heard all of the stories about how the use of AI is going to take over the legal profession. A recent decision issued by a Federal District Judge makes clear the dangers posed by attorneys indiscriminately relying upon AI generated case law without carefully first checking its accuracy.
The decision was issued in January 2025 in the case of United States v. Hayes, Case Number 2:24-cr-0280-DJC. In that Order, the District Court imposed sanctions against the federal criminal defense lawyer. In short, the Court determined that the lawyer had “submitted a fictitious or non-existent case and quotation in his written motion to unseal filed” with that Court. The Court further found that the lawyer had been given the chance to admit and correct his mistakes, but failed and refused to do so.
The big problem for the lawyer at issue is that he cited and relied upon a case that was “not a real case.” The Court found that the citation to that fake case had “all the markings of a hallucinated case created by generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT and Google Bard that have been widely discussed by courts grappling with fictitious legal citations and reported by national news outlets.”
The lessons of this case and decision are clear: 1) lawyers should tread carefully when using AI to conduct legal research; 2) if AI is used to generate legal citations, attorneys must still determine whether the cases are actual cases that actually match the citations generated; 3) attorneys must still determine, even the cases generated are real, does the language of the cases generated by AI match what is in the real case, and does the real case stand for the propositions urged by AI; and 4) if a mistake with respect to the use or reliance upon AI is brought to the attorney’s attention, he or she should immediately investigate and own up to – i.e., admit – any AI mistakes that were made.
Matthew Chivari
Leonard Trial Lawyers
February 5, 2025