Disbarment should be a no-brainer and a minimum.
Just “Southern China Airlines” should have raised eyebrows. This lawyer has shown obvious disrespect to the court, the court time, and to his client.
I don't think this is indictiative of a wider issue. Or likely to be repeated substantially.
In terms of severity it's painfully foolish but then again ChatGPT is a totally new tool and a lot of people will be caught off guard.
I am stunned the lawyer didn't at least look up the case notes or even prepare a pocket brief if he believed they were real but hard to find
Arguably the leading goof was using a technology the lawyer didn't understand and failing to inform the client of the risks of using it. Between that and citing garbage precedent-- half the bar might be eligible for discipline on any given day. The judge might issue sanctions but bar discipline is a different ball of wax.
Which makes me think that this case should be treated just as if the lawyer wrote it on their own. If the lawyer enters output of chatGPT they generated into court records as if it was their own, it was their own. The lawyer wrote those made up cases into the documents, and the entire matter should be treated as such.
It blows my mind the lawyer didn't double-check the fake cases cited by chatGPT, but had the idea to ask chatGPT whether those citations were legit (and then got his concern satisfied with a simple "yes").
What are we paying for, if the guy spends 4 months in prison before the faulty judgement being overruled, if the lawyer says he didn’t even work on the file.
When you hire a lawyer, you have no guarantee he will work for you.
In other words: I would be very surprised if perjury was on the table here. This falls under the kind of basic competence and client obligation that the Bar exists to address.
I would personally be surprised because I haven't seen that.
Now if the shit had slipped through, and the result of the misconduct had been a client going to jail or something, things might be different.