A US judge on Thursday imposed sanctions on two New York lawyers who submitted a legal brief that included references to six fictitious cases created by an artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT.
US District Judge P. Kevin Castel in Manhattan ordered lawyers Steven Schwartz, Peter LoDuca and their law firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman to pay a $5,000 fine in total.
The judge found that the lawyers acted in bad faith and made “false and misleading statements to the court to avoid consciousness”.
Levidow, Levidow & Oberman said in a statement Thursday that his lawyers “respectfully” disagreed with the court that they acted in bad faith.
“We made a good-faith mistake in failing to believe that one piece of technology could make a case out of whole cloth,” the firm’s statement said.
Attorneys for Schwartz said they declined to comment. LoDuca did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and his attorney said he was reviewing the decision.
Schwartz admitted in May that he had used ChatGPT to help research a brief in a client’s personal injury case against Colombian airline Avianca and had inadvertently included false references. LoDuca’s name was the only one on the brief prepared by Schwartz.
Ivanka’s lawyers first warned the court in March that they could not trace some of the cases listed in the brief.
Ivanka’s attorney, Bart Binino, said Thursday that regardless of the lawyers’ use of ChatGPT, the court reached the “correct conclusion” by dismissing the personal injury case. In a separate order, the judge approved the dismissal of Avianca’s petition because it was filed too late.
The judge wrote in Thursday’s restraining order that there was nothing “inherently inappropriate” about using AI “to assist” lawyers, but he said the rules of attorney ethics “have a gatekeeping role on lawyers.” imposed to ensure the accuracy of their filings.”
The judge also said the lawyers “perpetuated a bogus opinion” when the court and the airline questioned whether they existed. His order also states that the lawyers must inform the judges, all of them real, who were identified as the authors of the bogus cases.
