A lawyer’s dependence on ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence tool, to prepare a court filing for his client has backfired in a major way. Steven Schwartz, a lawyer for a man suing Avianca, a Colombian airline, over injuries sustained from a metal beverage cart, is facing a sanctions hearing on June 8th. This is after admitting last week that several of the cases he supplied to the court as evidence of precedent were fictitious and created by ChatGPT, the large language model created by OpenAI. Lawyers for Avianca raised concerns with the judge overseeing the case that six of the cases submitted by Schwartz were made-up judicial decisions with false quotes and bogus internal citations.
U.S District Judge P. Kevin Castel, after reviewing Avianca’s complaint, described the situation as an “unprecedented circumstance.” The invented cases included decisions titled “Varghese v. China Southern Airlines Ltd.,” “Miller v. United Airlines Inc.” and “Petersen v. Iran Air.” In an affidavit, Schwartz, an attorney with Levidow, Levidow & Oberman, who has been licensed in New York for more than 30 years, confessed wrongly using ChatGPT to produce cases in support of his client without the knowledge that its contents could be false. Schwartz apologized and declared that he would never again utilize generative artificial intelligence to supplement legal research without absolute verification of authenticity.
Peter LoDuca, another lawyer at Schwartz’s firm, argued that sanctions were not appropriate as there was no bad faith or intent to deceive the court or the defendant. However, the sanctions may involve Schwartz paying the attorneys’ fees that the other side incurred while uncovering the false information.
This isn’t the first time ChatGPT has fabricated information, as AI researchers refer to the phenomenon. In a recent incident, The Washington Post reported on ChatGPT including a law professor on a list of legal scholars who had sexually harassed someone, citing a Post article that did not exist. The professor described the allegation as “incredibly harmful.”
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