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?

check the alt text

I figured it was real, but it still comes across as *wrong*. Thus, uncanny valley.

I’m just sayin you ain’t the only one

whew, thank you.

It dies not help that his hand is in his pocket in a way that makes one leg look twice as wide as the other one. Throws everything off.

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.

I think it’s good actually that the prisons have counsel of this quality

That might be true if we could assume every judge and magistrate (not to mention plaintiff's attorneys) can and will perform the checking needed on filings from such counsel. I'm skeptical that such falsehoods will always be caught.

Big, and I cannot stress this enough, oof.

As you all know, I am not an attorney. But god damn, I am pretty sure these are not words that any attorney wants to see written about them by a Federal judge.

Yikes

The amazing thing about this one is that the law firm actually had a robust internal protocol re AI use that was designed to prevent this, and the attorneys whose conduct was at issue just disregarded it. That did not improve the court's opinion of their conduct.

Oh, yeah — when the OTSC first dropped, Deputy AG Lundsford over here’s first response was to ask if he could just not show up for the hearing. (The court declined.)

Mr. Lundsford’s general approach to citation appears to be “trust me, bro, as I have trusted you.” (The cites are to his own declaration. WILD to imagine putting that shit in writing, yeah?)

I'm not even a lawyer, but uh...

Here’s Mr. Lundsford’s declaration in full, you can read it for yourself storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Oh he’s toast. Ooooofffff

Yeah. I think we're seeing a systemic (though not ubiquitous!) failing of the legal world being dramatically exposed.

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. 😂