"An AI Fail by an Elite Litigation Firm"

David Lat (Original Jurisdiction) has the story. A brief excerpt:

AI mistakes are no longer the province of the wantonly stupid. They can even be committed by leading litigators at famous firms.

The firm is Boies Schiller Flexner, “one of the most prestigious and profitable law firms in the nation. It’s currently #55 in the Vault 100, the nation’s 100 most prestigious law firms, and #118 in the Am Law 200, the country’s 200 largest law firms based on revenue.” Big firm lawyers (like all lawyers), take note.

Here’s the declaration from the partner involved, filed together with a brief correcting the hallucinations:

I was and am the sole Firm partner with responsibility for overseeing the preparation and filing of the Filed Response Brief in this action. Under my direction, and with consent of the individual Respondents, the preparation of the Filed Response Brief included the use of artificial intelligence tools. The Firm is committed to the responsible use of artificial intelligence and has adopted policies and implemented trainings intended to protect against the risks of the improper use of artificial intelligence. Independent of the use of artificial intelligence tools, Firm lawyers are always expected to scrupulously proofread and cite check the accuracy of the factual and legal claims in court filings.

Notwithstanding these controls, the Filed Response Brief included material citation errors, including those identified in Appellants’ Reply Brief. As the attorney and partner in charge of the Filed Response Brief, I am embarrassed by and very much regret these errors. The Firm is undertaking an investigation to determine why its controls failed and to ensure appropriate corrective action is taken. However, as the supervising attorney ultimately responsible for signing and submitting the Filed Response Brief, I bear the responsibility for failing to personally verify the citations included in the brief.

Lat notes:

To his credit, John Kucera [the lawyer involved] fully and freely admitted the errors, and he didn’t throw any colleagues under the bus—even though I’m guessing the brief was prepared in the first instance by associates, whom Kucera did not name. No associates’ names appeared on the original response brief. The only lawyers on the brief besides Kucera were two partners, Alison Anderson and Max Pritt—and in the proposed corrected brief submitted along with his motion, Kucera removed the names of Anderson and Pritt, presumably because they had little or no roles in this mess….

Read the full article for more; as usual with David Lat’s work, which I like a great deal, it’s substantive, readable, and fair-minded.

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