Law Firms
5 hallucinated cases lead federal judge to kick 3 Butler Snow lawyers off case
Three Butler Snow lawyers may no longer represent a former corrections commissioner in Alabama because they filed two motions with five “completely made up” case citations produced by ChatGPT, a federal judge ruled last week. (Image from Shutterstock)
Three Butler Snow lawyers may no longer represent a former corrections commissioner in Alabama because they filed two motions with five “completely made up” case citations produced by ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence application, a federal judge ruled last week.
U.S. District Judge Anna M. Manasco of the Northern District of Alabama said fabricating legal authority “demands substantially greater accountability than the reprimands and modest fines that have become common as courts confront this form of AI misuse.”
Manasco also publicly reprimanded the lawyers; referred them to the Alabama State Bar; and ordered them to disclose the sanctions order to all clients, the opposing counsel and the presiding judges in every pending state and federal case in which they are counsel of record. They are also required to provide a copy of the order to every attorney at Butler Snow.
But Manasco did not sanction the law firm.
“Butler Snow acted reasonably in its efforts to prevent this misconduct and doubled down on its precautionary and responsive measures when its nightmare scenario unfolded,” Manasco wrote.
Law360 and Reuters covered Manasco’s July 23 decision.
Manasco found that three out of five lawyers who signed the motion were responsible for the errors. They included partner and assistant practice group leader Matthew B. Reeves, who said at a show-cause hearing the fake citations were due to his use of ChatGPT. A second sanctioned lawyer was involved in the drafting process, and a third was the practice group leader.
The citations hallucinated by ChatGPT either don’t exist or don’t stand for the proposition for which they were cited, Butler Snow said in a May 19 filing. The firm apologized for the error and said the use of AI violated the firm’s policy.
Butler Snow also hired Morgan, Lewis & Bockius to review all case citations involving the five lawyers in federal courts in Alabama and the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at Atlanta since April 2023. Twenty-eight Morgan Lewis attorneys reviewed more than 2,400 separate legal citations across 330 filings. No other instances of incorrect case references were found.
The lawyers were defending a former commissioner for the Alabama Department of Corrections in an inmate lawsuit alleging that he was not protected from repeated stabbings.
Reeves and Butler Snow general counsel Benjamin M. Watson did not immediately respond to ABA Journal emails seeking comment. Nor did Reeves immediately respond to a Journal voicemail message.
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