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Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

arstechnica.com

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Re: Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

#71

Post by jedimastert »

seanhunter wrote: post #17

What I find really strange about this is I use AI a lot as a “smart friend” to work through explanations of things I find difficult etc and I am currently preparing for some exams so I will often give the AI a document and ask for some supporting resources to take the subject further and it almost always produces something that is plausibly close to a real thing but wrong in specifics. As in when you ask for a refere…

> How does anyone have the confidence to ship a legal brief that an AI produced without checking it thoroughly?

They're treating it like they would a paralegal. Typically this means giving a research task and then using their results, but sometimes lawyers will just have them write documents and ship it, so to speak.

This is making me realize that Tech Bros treat chat GPT like the 1930s secretary they never got to have

Re: Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

#72

Post by financetechbro »

Balgair wrote: post #60

Wait until you guys hear about how they used AI in the California bar exam . https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/controversy-californi... The lawyer jokes aren't funny anymore...

This is a really crazy story

Re: Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

#73

Post by 0xFEE1DEAD »

swores wrote: post #35
kayodelycaon wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked ChatGPT to give Wikipedia links in a table. Not one of the 50+ links was valid.

Which version of GPT? I've found that 4o has actually been quite good at this lately, rarely hallucinating links any more. Just two days ago, I gave it a list of a dozen article titles from a newspaper website (The Guardian), asked it to look up their URLs and give me a list, and to summarise each article for me, and it made no mistakes at all. Maybe your task was more complicated to do in some way, maybe you're not…

Sorry for going off topic here but I've had the same experience.

I'm not sure which update improved 4o so greatly but I get better responses from 4o than from o4-mini, o4-mini-high, and even o3. o4 and o3 have been disappointing lately - they have issues understanding intent, they have issues obeying requests, and it happened multiple times that they forgot the context even though the conversation consisted of only 4 messages without a huge number of tokens. In terms of chain-of-thought models I prefer DeepSeek over any OpenAI model (4.5 research seems great, but it’s just way too expensive).

It's rather disappointing how OpenAI releases new models that seem incredible, and then, to reduce the cost of running them, they slowly slim these models down until they're just not that good anymore.

Re: Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

#74

Post by amirmi78 »

This is incompetent use of AI and the news related to it are becoming tiring. The result is that whenever I talk to some people outside the tech circle they just undeniably believe that AI will never be commonplace in high stakes situations, which is just a rapidly moving bar.

Re: Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

#75

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

rsynnott wrote: post #11

What is it with the American far-right and hiring the most _incompetent possible lawyers_? Like, between this and Giuliani...

There's a quote I can't find right now about how fascism is associated with lower competence because it not only prioritizes but demands loyalty over all else and you get a bench made up of just the best asskissers, ideologues, extremists.

Re: Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

#76

Post by tzs »

> "[T]he Court identified nearly thirty defective citations in the Opposition. These defects include but are not limited to misquotes of cited cases; misrepresentations of principles of law associated with cited cases, including discussions of legal principles that simply do not appear within such decisions; misstatements regarding whether case law originated from a binding authority such as the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit; misattributions of case law to this District; and most egregiously, citation of cases that do not exist," US District Judge Nina Wang wrote in an order to show cause Wednesday

30+ years ago when I was in law school [1] I would practice legal research by debunking sovereign citizen and related claims on Usenet. The errors listed above are pretty much a catalog of common sovereign citizen legal research errors.

Just add something about gold fringed flags and Admiralty jurisdiction and it would be nearly complete.

The sovereign citizen documents I debunked were usually not written by lawyers. At best the only legal experience the authors usually had was as defendants who had represented themselves and lost.

Even they usually managed to only get a couple major errors per document. That these lawyers managed to get such a range of errors in one filing is impressive.

[1] I am not a lawyer. Do not take anything I write as legal advice. Near the end of law school I decided I'd rather be a programmer with a good knowledge of law than a lawyer with a good knowledge of programming and went back to software.

Re: Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

#77

Post by cbfrench »

blululu wrote: post #25
eviks wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "a little time"

The Judge spent the time to do exactly this. Judges are busy. Their time is valuable. The lawyer used AI to make the judge do work. The lawyer was too lazy to do the verification work that they expected the judge to perform. This speaks to a profound level of disrespect.

I highly doubt the judge was tracking down citations or reading those cited cases herself to verify what was in them. They have law clerks for that. It doesn’t make it any less an egregious waste of the court’s time and resources, but I would be surprised if a district court judge is personally doing much, if any, of that sort of spadework.

Re: Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

#78

Post by LocalH »

grues-dinner wrote: post #8
victorbjorklund wrote: post #3

I dont understand how a lawyer can use AI like this and not just spend the little time required to check that the citations actually exist.

I constantly see people reply to question with "I asked ChatGPT for you and this is what it says" without a hint of the shame they should feel. The willingness to just accept plausible-sounding AI spew uncritically and without further investigation seems to be baked into some people.

I downvote comments like that, regardless of platform, in almost all situations. They don't really contribute much to the majority of discussions.

Re: Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

#79

Post by dionian »

Spooky23 wrote: post #51
rsynnott wrote: post #11

What is it with the American far-right and hiring the most _incompetent possible lawyers_? Like, between this and Giuliani...

Think about the quality of lawyer who would take Lindell as a client. He’s a bankrupt, likely mentally ill acolyte of a dude who is infamous for stiffing his lawyers. His connection with reality is tenuous at best.

Our justice system prides itself on giving everyone due process and a fair trial, even people you hate

Re: Mike Lindell's lawyers used AI to write brief–judge finds nearly 30 mistakes

#80

Post by ramesh31 »

AIPedant wrote: post #47
rsynnott wrote: post #11

What is it with the American far-right and hiring the most _incompetent possible lawyers_? Like, between this and Giuliani...

The problem is that Trump, Musk, Lindell, etc are all extremely arrogant and constantly disregard sound legal advice. Their lawyers aren't merely associated with a controversial client; their professional reputation is put at risk because they might lose easily winnable cases due to a client's dumb tweet. You have to be a crappy lawyer (or an unethical enforcer like Alex Spiro and Roy Cohn) to even want to work with…

>The problem is that Trump, Musk, Lindell, etc are all extremely arrogant and constantly disregard sound legal advice. Their lawyers aren't merely associated with a controversial client; their professional reputation is put at risk because they might lose easily winnable cases due to a client's dumb tweet.

Bingo. This has nothing to do with ideology. Good lawyers like to win. And when a client is demonstrably too stupid to let them do that, why bother.

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