The Dangers of Artificial Intelligence in the Law

While there is no question that ChatGPT has had an impact across many sectors, attorneys should be very careful before incorporating its use into the practice of law. The artificial intelligence chatbot, which was launched in 2022, is becoming increasingly popular and there are numerous sites urging lawyers to take advantage of the powerful program to improve their legal writing and research. However, one unlucky attorney who relied on the program to create a legal brief submitted to the court learned that with great power comes great potential for things to go wrong. The attorney claimed that he thought the program was a “super search engine”, however, the brief that ChatGPT generated contained made-up quotes from fictitious cases. The lawyer in question was sanctioned and the judge furthermore ordered the attorney to notify the real judges identified as the authors of the fake cases. While is seems incredibly obvious, practitioners must make sure to check the cases they rely on.

Below is a link to a Reuters article which describes the case in greater detail.

New York lawyers sanctioned for using fake ChatGPT cases in legal brief | Reuters

Thank you to Azi Baer for this week’s Tax Tracker!