- The Mississippi judge takes a dim view of the process once it became clear that lawyers on both sides were using AI to present their arguments.
- The sanctions order included fines, disqualification and disqualification from the process in question for the lawyers involved.
- AI advice remains a bit of a complicated issue, given the lack of accountability and the model’s tendency to “freak out”
In what can be seen as a comical development that could be a sign of things to come, a US federal judge had to manually intervene and admonish lawyers on both sides of the aisle after realizing they were using AI.
U.S. District Judge Sharion Aycock of the Northern District of Mississippi noted that this was not the first time her court had to address the issue of being “burdened to address AI hallucinations in court records.”
The judge ordered a pause in the proceedings, canceling the trial, while disqualifying the four attorneys involved in the case in question and barring two of them from appearing in any case in the local Northern District of Mississippi for two years.
An ‘insufficient and incredulous’ justification
While the case might have been a routine case on the judge’s docket, addressing a breach of contract claim for unpaid legal fees between the city of Aberdeen and a Louisiana attorney, Tom Withers III, some of the precedents cited in the argument never occurred, inviting the judge’s scrutiny and eventual
His attorney, Kathleen M. Wilson, used hallucinatory AI quotes to argue her position, a situation that was discovered when a court order required both sides to produce copies of the cases they had cited.
The city of Aberdeen, represented by Kathryn Y. Williams, was also found guilty of a similar crime: citing a nonexistent 1971 Mississippi Supreme Court decision and references to three other federal rulings that could not be replicated.
Both lawyers admitted to having used AI and claimed ignorance of the potential of the LLMs they used, sometimes hallucinating. The judge, however, took a dim view of the whole matter, noting that one of the lawyers had been practicing for at least six months using generative AI to write their cases without supervision, and that they had previously been warned against the practice in an unrelated case.
The judge noted that she “finds that explanation insufficient and incredulous” and fined the four lawyers a total of $8,000, singling out the two lawyers who used AI.
However, the case marks an important ruling that, ironically, could serve as an actual precedent against the AI-generated ones that got lawyers in trouble: Ignorance of AI hallucinations is not a viable legal defense.
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