Once again, it is not the younger associates falling prey to the lures of AI but older partners looking for shortcuts. Unbelievable.

AI is going to be the death of us all

Death by LLM.

Wow

This is amazing. Wild that a professional *who bills hourly* will set fire to their own reputation in order to, what, save a few hours of paralegal time?

Oh, good — my presumption above wrt costs was correct.

Morgan and Lewis is not an inexpensive firm.

O I knowwww

While I know the legal basis would be shaky, so are the kinds of lawyers who would use Chat GPT in the first place, so how long until a lawyer who is penalized for using AI in a court filing turns around and sues the AI provider?

I mean, it’s pretty much inevitable, I think

I will buy the popcorn.

If the AI is intended for legal work, then there might be a reason. Such as Lexis+ from Lexis Nexis. Using Chat GPT is like trying to do carpentry with Fisher Price tools.

If Fisher Price spent hundreds of millions of dollars telling people looking for carpentry tools theirs were better and cheaper...

Where has OpenAI ever promoted ChatGPT for anything? Their business is selling the GPT base models, and their chat is just a tech demo.

bsky.app/profile/kath...

There’s a transcript of the OTSC hearing, but it’s on PACER restriction for another month, nnnghhhh

The judge found that the associates were not primarily responsible and that the firm had responded appropriately and proportionately, and let them off the hook — although not without some dry shade for the firm’s “think of the children!” rhetoric

As an aside: who here knew off the top of their head that rule 11 didn’t apply to discovery motions?

I did, for reasons you know firsthand.

The two partners involved, however, were not so lucky. First up is Matthew B. Reeves. “Having been so extensively alerted of the risk that Al will make things up, and having blown through all of his firm's internal controls designed to protect court filings from counterfeit citations…” Yikes.

wow :(

Sorry, two partners and of counsel. The conduct of the other partner, William R. Lundsford, was so egregious that I forgot about William J. Cransford. I would describe the court’s commentary about how little effort Mr. Cransford would have needed to expend to prevent this disaster as “withering.”

This is beyond walk into the sea. This is leap into a volcano. I imagine if I were a client of this firm, I might be reviewing the work they did for me to see if false citations are in it because I'm sure the other parties will be checking to see if there are.

And now, we get to William R. Lundsford, apparently “Bill” to his friends and colleagues. Mr. Lundsford has, per his firm bio, “devoted his legal career to representing governmental officials in systemic, institutional reform litigation.” www.butlersnow.com/professional...

I love the Hotshot Lawyer Mullet.

He looks like this.

I was gonna say his face looks like it came from a plastic mold used to manufacture these guys. And then I read your alt text...

This alt!!!!!!!

Is that "uncanny valley" to anyone else?

Mr. Lundsford is not just a partner at Butler Snow, however. He is in fact a Deputy Attorney General of the State of Alabama, and it was in that capacity that he was defending the Alabama Department of Corrections and supervising the work of the other Butler Snow attorneys on this case.

Good grief, that guy bleaches his teeth, doesn't he?

My take on why we KEEP seeing this has always been "lack of meaningful oversight." There's certainly some of that here, but sheesh -- the idiocy is at a much higher level of responsibility than I might have hoped.

I knew this, but only because I had a Civ Pro professor who said "you only get discovery sanctions for discovery motions," and it has stuck with me all these years.

I did, I did!! Well, I didn't know it for federal court for sure, but our state rules are basically the same and I knew that Rule 26 and Rule 37 apply to discovery issues, including motions to compel. 😂

Butler Snow seems to have reacted decisively, at least. But woof.

Hopefully judges consider ordering the use of outside counsel to independently review citations as a sanction in future cases. That feels like the kind of thing that could have some pain associated with it, particularly if it came along with a publicly filed report of the results.

"we didn't find any other Gen AI, but, man, these guys are really bad Bluebookers."

“Parenthetical quote appears in the holding at the cited page, but is immediately followed by ‘The court disagrees’”

(I once actually caught OC quoting from a case as though it was the holding and not an internal quote from the prevailing party’s brief in the case below, which the appellate court was reversing)

There's a judge in DNM famous for very long opinions where he spends a long time summarizing the briefs and arguments, so it's something I have to watch out for a lot

As in, you worry OC might be quoting from those sections as authority? Or you worry the judge (my former boss) misquotes from the briefs?

I triple check citations by OC to make sure they're from the ruling instead of the parties' arguments! I've caught it a few times

Got it. Yes, that makes sense. I see how that’d be a risk.

👀

There is a bespoke version of this where you read very old #SCOTUS cases and don't realize that the Reporter used to summarize the parties' arguments before giving the Court's opinion.

Lol

Ohhhh I had this happen once with an OC, cited a case, directly on point for his argument...except when you flipped to the next page, first line, "We are not persuaded by this reasoning"

I'm sure she appreciated getting caught up in this: “erroneously included Lynette Potter in the signature block of the Motion to Compel for the Butler Snow attorneys of record in the case.”

Yeah she filed a pretty panicked “it wasn’t me! I was dead at the time! I was on the moon with Steve!” declaration storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...