AI Hallucination Cases

See story here and here.

(Motion for sanctions available here.)

"The court’s focus here is not the misuse of artificial intelligence to conduct unreliable legal research and drafting. It is the inexcusable submission of false authority and factual arguments to the court, the subsequent misrepresentations about the extent of the improper conduct, and the failure to take prompt responsibility for errors once discovered. The obligations on officers of the court at issue here precede by centuries the age of electronic research and artificial intelligence.

The failures to meet those obligations do serious damage to the respect for the legal profession, and they merit sanctions. The most serious sanctionable conduct consists of actions taken after the attorneys had time to consider the consequences of submitting false statements of law and facts to the court, and had time to discover and disclose the full extent of the errors in citations and in factual assertions.

[...]

Artificial Intelligence is not the cause of bad legal practice. Lawyers performed their obligations well and performed their obligations poorly before Al, before electronic research platforms, before on-line publication of case law, and before the development of the West Key Number System or Shepard’s indexes.

Submission of false legal citations and demonstrably false factual claims pose a grave threat to the judicial branch. People are skeptical of institutions, and the legal profession is not exempt. We are duty-bound to attend to the integrity the courts so that close scrutiny reveals a model of honesty, accountability, and truth-seeking.

The authority of the courts relies on public confidence that rulings are just and are grounded in the law, not on the whims of judges. “[A] lawyer should further the public’s understanding of and confidence in the rule of law and the justice system because legal institutions in a constitutional democracy depend on popular participation and support to maintain their authority.” (IRPC Preamble, par. 6) Officers of the court cannot become comfortable with careless or deliberate misrepresentation of facts or the law."

Underlying report & Recommendations can be found here.

"12) The Al tool possibly used was sophisticated enough to include pinpoint citations to precedential Third Circuit authority.
13) Fortunately for Boehm , the cases cited in his motion are very real decisions by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.
14) Unfortunately for Boehm, these cases are misrepresented in his motion and his motion also contains false quotations from these opinions."

"[T]he fact that Plaintiffs … did not "fabricate cases or cite nonexistent decisions" is of no help. When a case cite is "real," an attorney, or for that matter a judge, might see a case they recognize and assume the quote or holding has been accurately represented. That problem is illustrated here; although Chat GPT generated "holdings" that looked like they could plausibly have appeared in the cited cases, in fact it overstated their holdings to a significant degree. And while a litigant might get away with similar overstatements because they could, perhaps, reason their way to showing how a case's stated holding might extend to novel situations, an LLM does not reason in the way a litigant must.

To put it in a slightly different way, LLMs do not perform the metacognitive processes that are necessary to comply with Rule 11. LLMs are tools that "emulate the communicative function of language, not the separate and distinct cognitive process of thinking and reasoning." When an LLM overstates a holding of a case, it is not because it made a mistake when logically working through how that case might represent a "nonfrivolous argument for extending, modifying, or reversing existing law or for establishing new law;" it is just piecing together a plausible-looking sentence—one whose content may or may not be true."

Court later declined to reconsider this decision (see here).

"We disagree with respondent, however, that dismissing the appeal is an appropriate sanction for Farivar’s conduct. Our inherent authority to impose this sanction “should be exercised only in extreme situations, such as where the conduct was clear and deliberate and no lesser sanction would remedy the situation.” (Crawford v. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. (2015) 242 Cal.App.4th 1265, 1271.) We conclude that we can sufficiently address the prejudice to the parties and the court from [Counsel]’s sanctionable conduct and sufficiently achieve the deterrent purpose of sanctions (see, e.g., Code Civ. Proc., § 128.7, subds. (b)(2), (c) & (h)) by doing the following:

First, [Counsel] shall pay sanctions in the amount of $7,500 to the clerk of this court within 30 days after the remittitur is filed. We calculate this amount based on, inter alia: (1) the significant amount of time this court spent verifying the fabricated citations in the opening brief, and (2) that Farivar refused to accept responsibility for his conduct, instead characterizing the fabricated quotations and citations as mere “clerical citation errors” and continuing to misrepresent legal authority in his opposition to the sanctions motion.

Second, we strike appellant’s opening brief and require appellant to file, within 10 days of the issuance of this order,a corrected opening brief. Appellant’s corrected brief may differ from the version originally filed only to the extent it corrects or omits the fabricated citations and quotations in the original version. Appellant shall file and serve both a final version of the new brief as well as a redline version.

Finally, because we conclude attorney Farivar has violated a Rule of Professional Conduct, we are required to “take appropriate corrective action.” (Cal. Code Jud. Ethics,canon 3D(2).) In line with this obligation, we direct the clerk of the court to serve a copy of this order on the State Bar.

We acknowledge and have considered that, as appellant argues, the majority of the fabricated quotes in the opening brief do not appear to be misrepresentations that work to appellant’s advantage; that is, the brief does not represent the law to be more favorable to appellant’s arguments than it actually is.

Nonetheless, we must consider broader concerns about the integrity of the courts and the legal profession. Inaccurate citations in briefing—whether the result of technological hallucinations or human failure to verify—may be relied on in court decisions, “circulated, believed, and become ‘fact’ and ‘law’ in some minds. We all must guard against those instances. . . . ‘There is no room in our court system for the submission of fake,10hallucinated case citations, facts, or law. . . . ’ [Citation.]” (Noland, supra, 114 Cal.App.5th at pp. 448-449.)"

Plaintiff repeatedly cited non-existent or misleading authorities in her Fourth Amended Complaint. The Court identified at least one fabricated citation and several mischaracterized cases, noting these failures to comply with Rule 8 and prior court instruction, and relied on the deficient pleadings in granting dismissal.

Show Cause Order is here.

Order to Show Cause is here.