Disbarment is appropriate here.
Why not blame your laptop manufacturer for creating the hardware you used to file your fraudulent court documents?
Why not blame your laptop manufacturer for creating the hardware you used to file your fraudulent court documents?
Something interesting about the legal profession is that it is self-regulating. The state bars are typically not government organizations. Attorneys know that confidence in their profession is extremely important and they strike the balance between preserving that confidence and, you know, destroying someone's livelihood because they don't understand how LLMs work.
Because your laptop manufacturer doesnt claim your laptop “thinks”, is “intelligent”, doesnt build an entire fud marketing campaign around the two, doesnt claim it “creates” ideas on its own, doesnt claim it “learns like a human”, doesnt claim it has cognitive abilities and so on.
A professional civil engineer blaming a new untested simulation software after a bridge fails and causes injury - does it matter what the software claimed to do? It could claim itself to be god, but it's still up to the professionals to evaluate and select the tools they choose to use.
It's not like they were using an industry-standard tool they've been using for many years and it suddenly did something unexpected.
This is clearly carelessness. A basic out-of-bound check on the cases it hallucinated would be part of basic due-diligence. Digitized case indices are available within minutes.
What's even more egregious is that they went to the same tool to confirm its own reliability after they got some indication that it was unreliable. It doesn't take a professional to have commonsense.
Which bridge failed and physically injured someone here?
You’ll get old one day. It’s pretty challenging to keep track of what’s real and what isn’t possible with technology.
The guy apologized and said he thought it was a search engine.
He should definitely face some sanctions but someone had to learn this lesson in public the hard way for word to spread.
Lawyers use specific case law databases and they SHOULD approach any new tools with healthy skepticism.
And if he googled it and cited a fake case would it be better? Why wouldn’t you vet the information.
Disbarment is equivalent to taking away his entire life's work.
Two minute hate on the internet every day is fun and all but it's not that severe.
This is like surgeon doing wrong procedure he just invented on patient.
'Lawyer' is the kind of profession which actually holds its practitioners to a standard, because the system falls apart when they stop behaving honestly.
This wasn't an oopsie-daisies, this was dishonesty, followed by further dishonesty, when they supplied bogus references for these cases.
No, they wouldn’t
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.57...
How can anyone trust anything a lawyer does, when they are willing to fabricate documents, in order to continue to lie to a judge? This is Better Call Saul-level chicanery.
He could have fessed up and apologized when called out on it, but he doubled down.
I am also having a thought: stop bullshitting. Or stop being a lawyer as a result of gross incompetence (I wish the same applies to politicians).
Here is an example of one of the fabricated cases. The 11th circuit has no record of this case. 1 of the 3 judges named in the case was not on the 11th circuit at the time: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.57...