A retired California judge overseeing former Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey's lawsuit against State Farm discovered her law firms used artificial intelligence (AI) to generate citations—twice—resulting in a hefty fine.
Lacey was represented by legal powerhouse K&L Gates and Ellis George LLP in a lawsuit against State Farm, alleging the company refused to provide a legal defense for her late husband, who faced a civil suit after pointing a gun at a group of unarmed activists on the couple's front porch in March 2020.
Retired Judge Michael Wilner wrote in a May 6 order that Lacey's team submitted briefs "that contained bogus AI-generated research." He discovered that a "supplemental brief contained numerous false, inaccurate, and misleading legal citations and quotations... approximately nine of the 27 legal citations in the ten-page brief were incorrect in some way." He added at least two authorities cited did not exist and several quotes were misattributed and "phony."
Wilner identified two inaccurate citations in the law team's initial brief and sent them back to K&L Gates. The firm then "re-submitted the brief without the two incorrect citations—but with the remaining AI-generated problems in the body of the text," Wilner wrote.
"[W]hen I contacted them and let them know about my concerns regarding a portion of their research, the lawyers' solution was to excise the phony material and submit the Revised Brief—still containing a half-dozen AI errors," Wilner wrote. He added that the lawyers' actions "demonstrate reckless conduct with the improper purpose of trying to influence my analysis of the disputed privilege issues."
Wilner called the incident "scary," adding that "it almost led to the scarier outcome (from my perspective) of including those bogus materials in a judicial order. Strong deterrence is needed to make sure that attorneys don't succumb to this easy shortcut."
The firms were sanctioned and ordered to pay $31,100, Ars Technica reported.
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