Life Beyond the Briefs
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Life Beyond the Briefs
ANOTHER Lawyer Gets Sanctioned for AI Hallucinated Cases
Yet another law firm gets caught misusing AI. Inside this episode is the story of how Morgan & Morgan got sanctioned for filing a brief with eight made up cases.
We critique the appropriate and inappropriate uses of AI in legal research and drafting.
• Examination of a recent sanction case against a prominent law firm
• Discussion of the risks involved in relying heavily on AI for legal drafting
• Strategies for effectively integrating AI as a supportive tool, not a replacement
If you'd like to learn more about using AI correctly in your legal practice, tune in for expert insights and lessons.
Wyoming Federal Court Order Here: https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/xmpjjoeanpr/Wadsworth%20v.%20Walmart%20Order%20on%20Sanctions.pdf
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Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
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Hello, my friends, and welcome back to another Friday solo episode of Life Beyond the Briefs, the number one podcast for lawyers choosing to live lives of their own, design and build law practices that they love showing up to on Monday. You know what would prevent you from enjoying showing up to your law firm on Monday? A sanctions order. And it's like almost every other week now. There's another lawyer getting caught using ChatGPT or some other AI writing software to draft legal briefs and the AI hallucinates legal cases. I understand being the first lawyer to make this mistake and I understand maybe being the second lawyer to make this mistake, because I think the second lawyer actually went back and asked ChatGPT whether their cases were real, but at this point it seems like there's been eight or nine. And the latest law firm to get caught up in this is the largest personal injury law firm in the world, morgan Morgan, and the latest one of these stories comes out of the Federal District Court in Wyoming, where two Morgan Morgan lawyers and their local counsel have all been sanctioned for filing a motion in Lemonade that included eight made-up cases. So this is a personal injury case. It's against Walmart and an electronic or an electric bike company I don't know the underlying facts of the case, but I don't think they're important. Plaintiff used some term at her deposition that the lawyers wanted to have excluded at trial, and so they filed a brief and cited nine cases in their motion limine. Eight of the cases apparently didn't exist, and the thing that's interesting about this order and I'll link to this order in the show note description is the court kind of goes out of its way to describe the history of AI and legal cases and to give lawyers the roadmap for how you use this in the future, as if lawyers couldn't have figured this out already. So what I'm going to do in this episode is I'll quote kind of extensively from this opinion, because I think it's very good, and then I'll take you through some of the lessons from it.
Speaker 0:All right, so the court starts out with this background, which I don't want to say. I wrote it, but I've been saying this to people about AI for a while. It says quote legal research has improved over time, going from the use of digest books to online databases like Lexis and Westlaw. Litigators are beginning to make the jump from those databases into the world of artificial intelligence. When done right, ai can be incredibly beneficial for attorneys and the public. Legal advocates will likely be able to quickly furnish on-point research and draft motions, which may save costs for clients. Courts will be able to efficiently analyze briefs, make correct rulings, which may speed up the judicial process for litigants. Overall, technological advances have greatly accelerated our world, and AI will likely be no exception. However, comma. However, the current state of AI has its shortcomings and that's the end of the quote.
Speaker 0:And so what's happening is lawyers are using AI incorrectly. The wrong way to use AI is to go to it and ask it to draft a motion for you, and what Morgan Morgan did in this case is it drafted the shell of the motion and then it uploaded it to its what appears to be proprietary software. They have a website called mx2.law which requires a login, which I don't have, not being a Morgan Morgan lawyer, but kind of reading between the lines in the court's order. It appears to be some proprietary AI brief writing thing, because their lawyer out there boots on the ground, uploaded his shell motion eliminate and then asked MX2.law to add to this motion in limine federal case law from Wyoming, which sets forth the requirements for motion in limine, asked it to add more case law regarding motions in limine and asked it to add a paragraph to this motion that evidence or commentary regarding an improperly discarded cigarette starting the fire must be precluded, because there is no actual evidence of this and that amounts to impermissible stacking of inferences and pure speculation. Include case law from federal court in Wyoming to support exclusion of this type of evidence. Like man that, that last one, that seems awfully particular. I can't imagine there's a ton of federal case law in Wyoming, um, but that one seems awfully particular. So he uploads this thing to mx2.law and asks it to kind of flesh out the opinions for it. And of course, you know, maybe because there's not a lot of law around improperly discarding the cigarette starting the fire like this thing hallucinates eight of the cases. Now here's what the lawyers did. Right is when the defendant in this case, when Walmart, said we tried to look up these cases and none of them exist, they fell on their sword and they admitted that they had used the software and that they had not gone back and checked for the existence of these cases, which lawyers in earlier versions of this did not do. And that's why and the court goes out of its way to say sanctions in those earlier cases were worse than they were in this case because at least when they got caught they were honest, right. The coverup is often worse than the crime than it would have been in this case.
Speaker 0:But the point I started to make is that asking AI to draft this stuff for you is the wrong way to go about it. Like AI is great for beginning your research, if you don't know about a topic, ask it to summarize the topic and give you places to go and look. Honestly, I use Google for this. If I don't know a legal answer, first place I go is Google. Second place I go is the Virginia trial lawyers plaintiff only listserv. Third place I go is Lexis or Westlaw.
Speaker 0:But asking to begin your research is one way to use AI. Using it as a thought partner is a way that I use it a lot and if you're drafting briefs and drafting motions, using it as a thought partner to come up with analogies and examples is an unbelievable way to use AI. Or for case themes. Like you can tell it all about your case and ask it for some case themes. Ask it to help you with alliteration, that you can use a trial, things like that. That's amazing. Or asking it to plug gaps in your argument, like upload your entire brief in there, ask it what the likely response would be so that you can respond to the response before it even happens.
Speaker 0:Those are three ways to use AI in brief writing. Don't use it actually to write your brief or, if you do, at the very least go back and make sure that the cases are real, which is what the court faulted the lawyers for not having done. And the interesting thing about this case is the um. It appears to be an associate at Morgan and Morgan who drafted the initial um brief or the initial motion, limine, and the court also sanctioned local council and sanctioned um, one of the Morgan family who was involved in the case. Uh, and lawyers, local counsel and I think it's Michael Morgan had not yeah, team Michael Morgan had not actually reviewed the pleading before they signed their name to it, which is also something you should not be doing. This court in Wyoming does give a carve out and say like listen, had Morgan and Goody who's the local counsel, at least on some inquiry into whether these cases were real, they probably wouldn't have been sanctioned, but they didn't look at all. Lastly, the court parsed out the sanctions based on, I guess, degrees of culpability. The lawyer who drafted the brief and then did not look to see if there were any made-up cases got the highest sanction Court, revoked his Prohok Vichay status and find him $3,000. Um, michael Morgan did not have his Prohok Vichay status revoked, which is interesting, but he was fined a thousand dollars. And then local council was fined a thousand dollars.
Speaker 0:Um, if you're out there and you're a young lawyer like young lawyers we get these asks to be local counsel Don't do it, or don't do it any longer than you have to, because there's so much risk associated with letting somebody else kind of do the legwork or do all of the work and there's so much education of that other firm that you have to put in on the differences between the law in your state and the law in their state, which means that you actually have to know what the law in their state is so that you can educate them on what's different about your state. That's an aside, that's totally separate and apart from this. But you run the risk of somebody filing a motion either with made up cases or with cases that don't say what the lawyer is saying. They say, and unless you have a really hard up for work, doing local counsel work. I think it's just a pain in the ass, and so, unless it's like a subject matter where you don't know anything about it and you are doing that so that you can learn alongside an expert, that's one reason to do it. Or if it's a case that you otherwise would not have been able to attract, you know size-wise again that you're learning the subject matter from the expert. That would be another reason to do local council work. But other than that, like I, would stay away. So there are all kinds of lessons in this order and again I'm going to link to the order in the show note description.
Speaker 0:The thing is that AI creates shortcuts and, in the near term, the biggest takeaway that I have is that the real opportunity is to be the lawyer who's not using AI in the drafting, in creation of content, in aiding relationships with clients Like it's. Until this thing is actually good enough. It is an interesting thought partner supplement, but don't let it do your work. Go do the work on your own. Use it to help you edit, use it to help you refine, but don't let it create for you.
Speaker 0:For lawyers who are members of the Great Legal Marketing Tribe.
Speaker 0:I want to let you know that we have Dr Kane Elliott, who's the chief legal futurist at Filevine, coming to talk about AI and how you can use it safely and appropriately at the May GLM Tribe call, and so you will definitely want to be on that call live to get your questions answered.
Speaker 0:If you can't make it live, the recordings are always available in the member portal. And if you're not a member of the Great Legal Marketing Tribe but you want access to these experts and you want access to 20 years of information on how to grow your law firm simply and easily and effectively, we're currently running a promotion a 60 days trial for like $495. The only way to get there, though, is to buy the Renegade Lawyer Marketing book. After you buy that book, you'll be taken to a video page with an offer that explains the program and gives you an opt-in to buy. If you are not in rooms with lawyers and other smart people who are talking about how to stay on the cutting edge and how to do it safely, then you run the risk of either being left behind or filing a motion that has eight made up cases in it. Until next time, have a great weekend.
