Slightly preferable to a ChatGPT citation hallucination I suppose.

Cite case that says…,

I'm sure an entry level attorney drafted it and the senior attorney never bothered to check it over.

[TK TK TK]

This is why I highlight sections in my briefs and memos that still need work or citations added.

I say this as someone who once mistakenly submitted a paper in law school that included this banger line: [INSERT CONCLUSION HERE] bsky.app/profile/anna...

I wrote a memo to the Mass. Parole Commission (or whatever their name is) that had an intro about my client, who was seeking parole for 2nd degree murder, and then launched into another paragraph, "He has had a drink since that day." Not. Not had. That's what I was going for. (Paroled, though!)

All is well that ends well!!

😂 that’s awesome.

The stuff of nightmares. (As someone VERY prone to these types of errors, I have learned to always seach for square brackets and tracked changes before filing.)

That's nothing. When I did that during law school, it was intentional!!! (No it wasn't.)

is this a ChatGPT/AI thing? I recently had to call out two co-authors for sending me an Introduction section clearly written by AI that just said things like [REFS]

Haha, no, I was definitely in law school before ChatGPT. Maybe AI does it too but I know a lot of writers who use bracketed text as a placeholder.

[Mailmerge] memories 👵🏼

No, it’s just human error. Sometimes when you’re in the middle of writing a brief, you don’t want to stop and look up a specific cite, so you leave a placeholder to enter later. Every lawyer does it, but 99% get caught before filing.

A former co-worker once used something like FUCKWIT as a placeholder in an indictment and forgot to do that final CTRL-F.

Programmers use: #error INSERT CONCLUSION HERE

I do this all the time when I write, but this is also why I make everything inside the brackets bolded and bright red so there is NO mistaking it on the page. Because I am an idiot. :D

Honestly, I highlight. I don't trust myself even a little bit.

When I'm writing and making notes to myself in the draft, I put three exclamation points before and after the note, and do a search for them before considering it final.

Same, but in yellow.

[redacted]

I'm just saying, y'all's softwares need a tool that uses this fancy tech \[[^\]]*\] That should work in your computers find and replace if it has a checkbox for "Regular Expressions" or Regex

\[ → match a literal opening [ [^\]]* → match zero or more characters that are not ] \] → match a literal closing ] Together, it matches anything inside square brackets like [hello world]. --- If, after \[, you add (?!\d+\]), it will skip things like numeric refs like [13]

My husband, an editor, included on his resume the phrase “expert profreader”

As a programmer, it's a bit surprising to me that they apparently don't have any sort of automated QA tooling to catch this stuff. Or at least the folks left at DOJ don't know how to use it if they have it. We always automatically have a linter run on what we write before it can can external damage.

Programmers have all learned that trusting programmers is doomed to failure. I guess lawyers have more faith in themselves. The current crop at DOJ seem to have *enormous* faith in themselves, which is always a bit of a red flag.

Having the capacity for multiple levels of review for drafting is such a pleasure and a luxury.

😂

I once submitted a CV eith the line "i have a strong attention to detail and "

That is why, when I am writing a long paper, I insert 3 repeated letters to identify areas I need to go back to: fill in data, a graph, a citation, etc. I remove the letters when I fill in a gap. Just use the Find feature to be sure I have covered everything.

Many papers I submitted during my doctorate contained similar errors. AS A STUDENT. JFC.

I suspect that “the best of us” no longer work at the DOJ.

Boom!

Had opposing counsel file a brief once that said [THROW SOMETHING IN HERE]. Was a pretty critical section of the brief too.

As a paralegal, I would wither and die if my boss filed something like that. But also a client once emailed me some documents and I meant to reply "Got it!" but what I actually replied was "Go tit!" so yeah I guess failure to proof comes for all of us once in a while.

And the fact that I didn't double check that skeet and left out a word is really just perfect 🤣

Just cite Article I and be done with it.

Whoops. Missed a letter. Article II. Which I guess only goes to prove the point...

Between cut and paste and AI, pleadings are a snap. 😉

What are the odds that ChatGPT wrote the whole thing?

Maybe they were asking the judge to do it for them.

In this WH, all the the time.

Maybe Rudy filed that brief. His coffee company has had this since its inception.

👍

hey at least it suggests some of the filing wasn't gen ai.

I have a footnote in my senior thesis that reads "some book, probably (author name)". Of course, that was over 30 years ago, and they couldn't use the internet to check the citation. I couldn't find a copy of the book I hard read in 5th grade at the time. Never found it, still don't know what it is

They are all evil and monumentally incompetent people.

I’ve known incompetence was a feature of Authoritarianism but I didn’t account for this level of incompetence. In my hope of us overcoming, I think it’s better than the alternative but then hits are elsewhere. Ex: CDC.

I once, ONCE, mailed out a prospect email that said [dear prospect] to about a 100 people. Once.

Quoting the original in the reply has got me stuck in an eternal loop, watching the DOJ make this same mistake over and over.