Submitted 3 weeks ago by Pro@programming.dev to technology@lemmy.world
https://ppc.land/arizona-court-sanctions-lawyer-for-ai-generated-false-citations/
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/35742052
An Arizona federal court issued extensive sanctions against attorney Maren Bam on August 14, 2025, after finding that her brief contained multiple artificial intelligence-generated citations to non-existent cases. The sanctions include revocation of pro hac vice status, striking the brief, and mandatory notification to state bar authorities.
How naïve it was of me, to think that the New York Avianca case in 2023 was high profile enough for lawyers to have learnt their lesson, but nope, it’s getting worse each and every month that goes by:
www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/
It doesn’t help that the most common outcomes there are “Warning” or a fine in the low thousands. If a legal practice can save $500,000 a year on avoiding doing their own research, and the worse that’s likely to happen is “Warning” or a $2,000 fine, then why would they not?
How are they not immediately disbarred for this? Surely fabricating documents and citations gets you disbarred right?
It doesnt, but it should. Its malpractice of the highest degree and shows clear disregard for properly representing a client
As far as I understand it judges don’t despair lawyers the bar association does. That requires a tribunal and the entire thing takes forever.
So these lawyers may actually end up getting disbarred but as with all things legal, it will take 500 times longer than any reasonable person thinks it should.
All the prior cases from these chatGPT lawyers should be reviewed. What other shortcuts were they taking before? Did an innocent person end up in jail because of some prior negligence?
A very small minority of lawyers work criminal cases.
This lawyer in particular only works on Social Security Disabilty claims.
It’s happening in Australia too. The headline in this article needs some work.
I propose:
“Soon to be disbarred King’s Council used Assumed Intelligence instead of Actual Intelligence to argue a murder case”
ITT: Lawyers took the techbros’ blue pill
Why should you have to learn law if your are a lawyer?
Most of them don’t
I don’t trust lawyers at all
You’re better off with a lawyer than without one. I used to work in a court, (not in any particular legal sense, I reset passwords).
There was always somebody who came in with that attitude and decided to represent themselves often times when they were guilty as sin. A lawyer was never going to be able to get them off a charge, but maybe they would have been able to get a reduced sentence. Representing yourself is never a good idea because you don’t actually know the law, no one does, that’s why lawyers are so expensive.
dan@upvote.au 3 weeks ago
I’m amazed that these lawyers are using things like ChatGPT, when better solutions exist for the legal industry. The big legal databases (like LexisNexis) have their own AI tools that will give you actual useful results, since they’re trained on caselaw from the database, and link to the relevant case so you can verify it yourself.
FenrirIII@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Do is it free?
dan@upvote.au 3 weeks ago
No, but law firms generally subscribe to these databases.
At least where I live, lawyers can also go to the local law library to use LexisNexis for free.