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Two US lawyers fined for submitting fake court citations from ChatGPT

theguardian.com

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Re: Two US lawyers fined for submitting fake court citations from ChatGPT

#131

Post by hgsgm »

eastbound wrote: post #55
notavalleyman wrote: post #35

> Levidow, Levidow & Oberman said in a statement on Thursday that its lawyers “respectfully” disagreed with the court that they had acted in bad faith. “We made a good-faith mistake in failing to believe that a piece of technology could be making up cases out of whole cloth,” it said. Seems like they still don't get it. It's not good faith representation of your client, it's not good lawyering to interrogate a chatbo…

The risk of ChatGPT is not that people take it seriously, since no-one does even those lawyers; The risk is that it is becomes acceptable to pretend to not understand the shortcomings of ChatGPT, and pretend that it does not make the person an irresponsible adult. Like editing Wikipedia then citing the contents. Impossible to defend in good faith, but passes as a legit excuse in a public court. Some people really kno…

Wikipedia is (almost always) not a citable source. Everyone who knows what "citing a source" is (including Wikipedia itself) knows that.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia

Sure, we all do it informally, but implicit in that is that you should check the real sources if you care about accuracy.

Re: Two US lawyers fined for submitting fake court citations from ChatGPT

#132

Post by hgsgm »

ianhawes wrote: post #117
blindriver wrote: post #78

There are A LOT of VERY bad lawyers out there. I have a friend who used to be a federal judge for immigration, and he said that immigration lawyers are especially the worst, because families need their services desperately, and these lawyers will take their money and spend NO time on their cases. They show up to court and are figuring stuff out real time. He tore one lawyer a new asshole for doing exactly this for hi…

I work in the immigration space. Part of the problem is that because immigration is technically federal but operates almost entirely in administrative venues (i.e. USCIS and EOIR), immigration lawyers only need to be barred in their home state and do not generally need admission to a relevant federal court bar or appear pro hac vice to represent clients in immigration court or even to make an appearance in filings.

How is that relevant? Incompetent / criminal lawyers are almost never disbarred in any field.

Re: Two US lawyers fined for submitting fake court citations from ChatGPT

#133

Post by pclmulqdq »

blindriver wrote: post #78

There are A LOT of VERY bad lawyers out there. I have a friend who used to be a federal judge for immigration, and he said that immigration lawyers are especially the worst, because families need their services desperately, and these lawyers will take their money and spend NO time on their cases. They show up to court and are figuring stuff out real time. He tore one lawyer a new asshole for doing exactly this for hi…

It's also not usually a lot of money in comparison to their alternatives. I once had a criminal defense lawyer tell me that they make up the difference with scale and essentially batch-process people.

Re: Two US lawyers fined for submitting fake court citations from ChatGPT

#134

Post by droopyEyelids »

SoftTalker wrote: post #129
xen2xen1 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked with legal software professionally a few times, and kept thinking software won't replace lawyers, it'll replace paralegals. Not all, but a great deal of grunt work could be replaced with AI and good forms. Now if we could get them not to lie?

Do we even know why AIs "hallucinate"? Is it possible to prevent it?

I think it's because AIs aren't actually in touch with reality as we know it, they're generating text from a sort of graph of concepts that comes out of the training process.

Re: Two US lawyers fined for submitting fake court citations from ChatGPT

#136

Post by mirekrusin »

notavalleyman wrote: post #35

> Levidow, Levidow & Oberman said in a statement on Thursday that its lawyers “respectfully” disagreed with the court that they had acted in bad faith. “We made a good-faith mistake in failing to believe that a piece of technology could be making up cases out of whole cloth,” it said. Seems like they still don't get it. It's not good faith representation of your client, it's not good lawyering to interrogate a chatbo…

Oh boy, no wonder we invented religion.

Re: Two US lawyers fined for submitting fake court citations from ChatGPT

#137

Post by pixl97 »

sarchertech wrote: post #91
hospitalJail wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You’re very wrong about the perception of doctors. According to polls, doctors are the 2nd most trusted profession. https://news.gallup.com/poll/388649/military-brass-judges-am ... https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/top-spenders?cy... They are the 4th largest briber in the US.

Fewer than 20% of physicians belong to the AMA, so that’s just an absurd statement. By that logic all old people are the 15th largest bribers.

I mean as much as politicians go after old peoples votes, you might be right.

Re: Two US lawyers fined for submitting fake court citations from ChatGPT

#138

Post by mirekrusin »

brewdad wrote: post #87
bitshiftfaced wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seems like they still don't get it. Oh they get it. ChatGPT explained it to them, and then suggested that they take this position because it was the least bad option.

Right. They aren't completely finished with potential punishments. A review by the Bar is likely still ongoing. They can't do anything but pretend it was all done in good faith. Much like a person or company who may end up in a lawsuit can't issue a "real" apology when they screw up lest it be used against them.

I bet a beer they came up with this defense line with a help of gpt.

Re: Two US lawyers fined for submitting fake court citations from ChatGPT

#139

Post by janosdebugs »

jeroenhd wrote: post #46

LegalEagle did a video on this case two weeks ago, digging into it in some more depth: https://youtu.be/oqSYljRYDEM They lied to a judge, doubled down, showed further incompetence by admitting to not knowing how the legal reference they supposedly quoted was even structured, then lied to a judge again trying to get more time to get their story straight, and all it cost them was $5000? And even then they have the guts…

Leonard French does a pretty good breakdown too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5YaGACnJpg

Re: Two US lawyers fined for submitting fake court citations from ChatGPT

#140

Post by dctoedt »

droopyEyelids wrote: post #98
BlakeSimpson wrote: post #9

It blows my mind that a lawyer would go through all the schooling and DEBT just to use ChatGPT and risk losing their BAR card. Sure, I see plenty of uses for ChatGPT in their field, but to not even check the output before submitting it is what blows my mind.

Everyone is piling onto you here, but another aspect is that many lawyers already don't do their own research, they use paralegals to do it for them. With that information I think it's less mind-blowing, they were simply assuming ChatGPT could do the work of a paralegal

> many lawyers already don't do their own research, they use paralegals to do it for them.

If you mean that some lawyers use paralegals to do word searches for potentially-relevant case law (i.e., published judicial opinions as precedents), that might be true. But in my experience, good lawyers either do the raw research themselves, or at a minimum they use junior lawyers to do the initial searching for precedents; then if necessary, they do supplemental searching themselves, based on their greater experience.

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