Two More Lawyers Pay for Relying on Artificial “Intelligence”

Two lawyers were sanctioned by the Ninth Circuit on June 3 for relying on generative artificial intelligence to draft a legal brief, resulting in numerous errors and false statements to the court. The court ordered each attorney to pay $2,500, barred them from practicing before the Ninth Circuit for six months, and required them to include an AI disclosure in all filings for two years. The case underscores the legal profession's growing consequences for uncritically using AI tools and then failing to be transparent about the mistakes.

As we’ve discussed here before and, unfortunately, as people will probably have to keep discussing from now until the Sun grows old and expands to consume the Earth, if “people” survive that long, artificial “intelligence” is perhaps not all it’s cracked up to be. Generative AI has its uses, you say? Okay, then go use it for those uses. But don’t rely on what it tells you in any situation that really matters, or you are likely to regret having done so. Also, if you get caught relying on it, my advice is not to lie about this to the court. It’s too late for the lawyers who got sanctioned by the Ninth Circuit for this on June 3, as detailed in the opinion below. Well, I shouldn’t suggest that they lied . Let’s say they “violated their duty of candor” when they were less than “transparent” when explaining the source of the many obvious errors in their brief, and thus “knowingly or recklessly made false statements” to the court. Because that’s how the court put it. It also noted other problems with the logic of some of their explanations, demonstrating, it said, that the lawyers’ “post-hoc rationalizations are thus not forthright.” And man, just like your parents always told you, you don’t want to be in a situation where your post-hoc rationalizations may be seen as not forthright. That is not good. I’m no Biblical scholar, but I think that was in the first draft of the Ten Commandments, wasn’t it? “Thou shalt not be less than forthright in thy post-hoc rationalizations”? Good thing somebody did some editing before those were released to the public. Sorry, I meant “Somebody.” This case is not so different from the hundreds of cases to date in which somebody small S has been punished—not just embarrassed, but punished—for relying on generative artificial intelligence instead of their own. Just using these things is not itself sanctionable, as many courts have explained. But there seems to be something about these tools that makes people assume they can rely on the output without double-checking it. Don’t do that. And again, don’t be less that forthright if you get caught. As the Ninth Circuit stressed, “ t here is no upside” to that. We stress that when an attorney learns of any error in a filing—including generative AI hallucinations—he should immediately alert the court and opposing counsel of the error and disclose its source. There is no upside to denying the use of generative AI or to passing off an AI hallucination as an innocent typographical error. The other rules discussed in this order—competence, diligence, meritorious arguments, citations to authority, attestations to accuracy—do not turn on the source of the error. Sanctions: ordered to pay $2500 each, forbidden to practice before the Ninth Circuit for six months, forced to give a copy of this embarrassing order to pretty much everybody except their grandparents, required to include an “AI disclosure” under penalty of perjury in all filings for the next two years, and referred to the state bar for possible further punishment. There is no upside