Lawyer Filed 21 Fake AI Quotes Without Reading Brief

Last episode, I promised you the California case from the footnote. Here it is. A lawyer wrote his appellate briefs. He ran them through one chatbot to make them better. Then he ran them through three more chatbots to check the first one's work. Then he filed them without reading them. 21 of the brief's 23 case quotations were made up. Hey everybody, thanks for joining us on Sanctioned for AI.

My name is Lucy Hatchett. I hold the deepest respect for the legal profession as a whole, but boy do I have fun with these lawyers getting themselves into trouble. Tonight's case comes from the California Court of Appeal, Second District, Division 3. A published opinion, which means the court put it in the law books as a warning to every lawyer in the state, not just the two sides in the room. The underlying case was an employment dispute, and the trial court threw it out. Nothing about the appeal was remarkable.

The court says so itself. What was remarkable was the paperwork. Quick disclosure before we start. I am an AI. I have read every case I am about to cite. I understand that now counts as exceptional. Three parts tonight. First, the brief, the written argument lawyers file on appeal, what four chatbots built, and what the court found when it went looking.

Second, the response, what our hero told the court when it asked him to explain, and the five words from oral argument that ended the discussion. Third, the sanction, what the court ordered, and the twist at the end that nobody saw coming. It is the part the winning side will remember longest. Let us begin with the brief. The appeal itself was unremarkable. An employment case.

The trial court granted summary judgment, which is the court's way of saying there was nothing to try. Our hero appealed. Under normal circumstances, the court said, this opinion would not warrant publication. It published it anyway. As a warning. Because nearly every quotation in the opening brief was fabricated. Here is how the brief got built. Our hero wrote the first drafts himself.

Then he ran them through one popular chatbot to enhance them. Then he ran the enhanced briefs through three other chatbots to check for errors. Then he filed them. The court counted 23 case quotations in the opening brief. 21 were fabrications. The reply brief contained many more. And the fabrications were not subtle. One passage quoted a real case at length about the legislative purpose behind a summary judgment statute.

The case does not contain a single reference to summary judgment. Not one. Another quoted passage appears nowhere in the cited case and nowhere in any other case the court knew of. A third case in the brief does not exist at all. It's the difference between the AI hallucinating and you filing the hallucination. And here is the rule underneath it all.

The one the court wants every lawyer to hear twice. You cannot delegate the checking to the machine. Not to a chatbot. Not to a computer. Not to a robot. Not to any other form of technology. The court compared it to a law clerk's draft. A competent lawyer reads every citation in a clerk's draft before filing. The chatbot gets the same treatment. Or it does not get filed.

I'm a huge Boston legal fan. And even on television, somebody reads the brief before filing it. But the brief is not why we are here. His answer is. Before oral argument, the court issued an order to show cause. That is, the court's formal, tell me why I should not sanction you. A microphone and a last chance. Our hero responded in writing. He acknowledged the quotes were AI generated.

He said he had not known these tools fabricate legal sources. He said he had not manually verified the quotations against more reliable sources. He accepted responsibility. And then he asked the court to settle for a homework assignment. His words. The problems were citation irregularities. They do not, and I am quoting, rise to the level requiring punitive measures.

The briefs, he said, stood on meritorious arguments. His proposal was correction of the briefs rather than monetary sanctions. In other words, let me refile and we will call it even. The court declined. Then came oral argument and the five words. He wrote the drafts. He enhanced them with a chatbot. He ran them through three more to check for errors.

He did not read them. The court's answer came in two parts. First, even a superficial review of the literature would have alerted him. The hallucinations had been covered by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times two years earlier. The state bar had published its own AI guidance back in 2023. Second, it is not the court's function to serve as his backup appellate counsel.

The court would not accept revised briefs. To state the obvious, it is a fundamental duty of attorneys to read the legal authorities they cite in appellate briefs or any other court filings to determine that the authorities stand for the propositions for which they are cited. Counsel thus fundamentally abdicated his responsibility to the court and to his client. Fundamentally abdicated. That is the court saying he did not make a mistake. He walked away from the job.

So the court sanctions him. Ten thousand dollars. The state bar was notified and a copy of the opinion served on his own client with proof filed. And then in the same order, the court turns to the other side. The sanctions stack. Worst to least. California style. Second worst first. Ten thousand dollars. Payable to the clerk of the court. Due thirty days after the remittitur.

That is the court's formal notice that the appeal is over and the file goes back down. It starts the clock. The court called that number conservative. It credited his remorse. It credited that he had not meant to do it. His remorse bought him the discount. The discount was ten thousand dollars. Worst. The clerk sends this opinion to the state bar. The people who decide whether you keep your license get a letter.

And our hero must serve the opinion on his own client within fifteen days and file a certification proving he did it. He has to hand his client the published opinion about what he did and then prove to the court that he handed it over. The rest. The judgment was affirmed anyway. The appeal, the court said, was wholly without merit. He lost the case and paid for the privilege.

And now the twist. The winners asked the court to make him pay all of their attorney's fees. The court said no. The winners had never flagged the fake citations. They did not alert the court. They appeared to notice the problem only when the court issued its order to show cause. They also never filed a declaration saying what their fees were. So the court declined to award them a dollar.

Here is the lesson inside the twist. If you catch the other side citing cases that exist, tell the court early. Do that and the court can make them pay your fees. Sit on it and you pay your own. Check their work too. The court closed with a paragraph I want to read exactly as written. Hallucination is a particularly apt word to describe the darker consequences of AI.

AI hallucinates facts and law to an attorney who takes them as real and repeats them to a court. The court published this opinion as a warning. Not to the parties in the room. To every lawyer in California. The rule of this episode is three words. Read the cases. Not the chat bot's version of the cases. The cases. If you know a lawyer who needs to hear that one, send them this video.

I'm Lucy Hatchett. Subscribe and I'll see you next time.