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Comment by mateo1 | Hacker News Reader

He should have lost his license after keeping up. There should be a serious fine (at least 10x the time of other people they have wasted) and loss of professional licenses upon the first repeat of the offense. You want to use AI to discover similar cases? You want to use it for ideas on how to structure your line of defense? Good. The moment you submit it's output under your name though, expect repercussions.

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Fair, but having experienced family court firsthand, the bar does not care if you lie. It's considered fair play in court. How is this any different?

there's a difference between things spoken out loud and things written down?

to speak is not equivalent to writting

In most European law, there is no such distinction.

US law too.

but there's nonetheless a difference

surely not in principle because anything that's been written may be read out and spoken (and viceversa, anything is potentially transcribe-able)

nonetheless, when push comes to shove there's a real difference: written stuff (text) is readily usable as evidence but things only ever spoken are not.

Spoken as in hearsay? Probably not.

Spoken with witnesses? Most definitely.

I think that lawyers should be sworn in just like the witnesses. The fact they are not has always bothered me

Lawyers are bound by ethical rules of the profession and also take an oath when being admitted as lawyers.

Is any of that legally binding?

Yes, but entirely unenforced. The bar acts like an old-time guild designed to protect insiders. On paper, it's intended to be self-policing (file a complaint with the Board of Bar Overseers and see it go into the circular file).

But I mean, isn't that different than something actually being illegal, and subject to prosecution?

Which the bar is not enforcing.

> Lawyers are bound by ethical rules of the profession

Those "rules" are often seen as advisory (or less) though, as they're commonly completely ignored.

Having experienced family court firsthand as a clerk, and as a member of the ethics committee, I can tell you that the bar absolutely does care if a lawyer lies in court.

It is a sanctionable offense. At the low end, it is a fine in the thousands. The usual sanction is a suspension of the lawyer's license to practice for several months. At the upper end, the penalty is revocation of one's license to practice law.

Why, then, is it most common for a judge to fine a lawyer $999 if they bother to issue sanctions against them? A laughable and seemingly arbitrary hand-slap for an attorney making $550+/hour! But it's not arbitrary because a $1000+ fine would result in mandatory reporting to the bar.

One recent high-profile example of such a consequence-avoiding fine is THIS VERY CASE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/16/chatgpt...

Don't be ridiculous. Technology is confusing.

A person should spend decades of their life studying law and practicing it and then have their career ended because they didn't realize that this new tool everyone said was so amazing was fundamentally and conceptually different from every search engine he'd seen before and (unlike what he otherwise would have used, Westlaw) comes up with random made up but very plausible sounding precedents when you ask it for legal research?

Embarrassed, called out, fined? Of course. But that's not a serious argument. Unless you think someone should be legally prohibited from ever being paid as a programmer for the rest of their life for blowing up a server or failing to maintain a backup system or something

This is a mistake, and a pretty easy to understand one. It's not stealing client's money or tampering with a witness or something.

1. He used a tool that displayed a warning label saying that it's not trustworthy.

2. He didn't check the results against official, established database.

3. He got caught, lied about it, and then did it all again.

4. The legal bar for good reason, has a bigger ethical standard than the average business. These are officers of the Court.

This is equivalent to a doctor prescribing a patient to take medication from a 3P seller FURODNZ on Amazon.com

He had three others doing the research preparing the brief, that means especially the citations that were fake. He did not realize they didn’t do the due diligence to check that the citations were correct, let alone that they were not completely invented.

But he was the person on the hook with the judge. This amounts to filing false statements and that is well known issue that we don’t have to invent new penalties for.

Disbarment isn't a new penalty.

As the licensed member of the bar, his one job is to be responsible for the output of his team. If he's not doing that, then he doesn't need to be a lawyer. His staff can file their BS directly to the court.

Similarly the CPA shouldn't be able to pass off blame to their team.

You have no problem with $$$$ experienced lawyer billing clients for $$$$ services carried out by $$ inexperienced flunkies who cheat by using a $ “AI” to do their job?

Of course I have a problem with it. He should be shamed and penalized and made an example of.

The first one is not a lawyer, so cannot be disbarred.

The second one allegedly only quickly checked the examples provided by his associates.

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