Who's Submitting AI-Tainted Filings in Court?

https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/whos-submitting-ai-tainted-filings-in-court/

by cratermoon • 9 months ago

83 48 9 months ago

cyberlaw.stanford.edu

Animats• 9 months ago

Answer: Solo practitioners and pro-se litigants.

ronsor• 9 months ago

Pro-se litigants

I wonder when we're going to see an AI-powered "Online Court Case Wizard" that lets you do lawsuits like installing Windows software.

landl0rd• 9 months ago

Her balance was $47,892 when she woke up. By lunch it was $31,019. Her defense AI had done what it could. Morning yawn: emotional labor, damages pain and suffering. Her glance at the barista: rude, damages pain and suffering. Failure to smile at three separate pedestrians. All detected and filed by people's wearables and AI lawyers, arbitrated automatically.

The old courthouse had been converted to server rooms six months ago. The last human lawyer was just telling her so. Then his wearable pinged (unsolicited legal advice, possible tort) and he walked away mid-sentence. That afternoon, she glimpsed her neighbor watering his garden. They hadn't made eye contact since July. The liability was too great.

By evening she was up to $34k. Someone, somewhere, had caused her pain and suffering. She sat on her porch not looking at anything in particular. Her wearable chimed every few seconds.

Tuna-Fish• 9 months ago

Would get sued out of existence in very short order. There are really tight laws around providing legal advice. AI can only be safely offered when it's general purpose, that isn't marketed towards providing legal advice. (And no, if you have an "Online Court Case Wizard", marketed as such, putting a "this is for entertainment purposes only, this is not legal advice" in the corner of the page doesn't help you.)

cortesoft• 9 months ago

The article didn’t include any numbers on what the general lawyer population is compared to the results.

For example, they make the claim that solo and small firms are the most likely to file AI hallucinations because they represent 50% and 40% of the instances of legal briefs with hallucinations. However, without the base rate for briefs files by solo or small firms compare to larger firms, we don’t know if that is unusual or not. If 50% of briefs were files by solo firms and 40% were filed by small firms, then the data would actually be showing that firm size doesn’t matter.

cratermoon• 9 months ago

They make the claim that solo and small firms are the most likely to file AI hallucinations because they represent 50% and 40% of the instances of legal briefs with hallucinations.

Show me where she makes any predictive claims about likelihood. The analysis find that of the cases where AI was used, 90% are either solo practices or small firms. It does not conclude that there's a 90% chance a given claim using AI was done by solo or small firm, or make any other assertions about rates.

b112• 9 months ago

This analysis confirms what many lawyers and judges may have suspected: that the archetype of misplaced reliance on AI in drafting court filings is a small or solo law practice using ChatGPT in a plaintiff’s-side representation.

That is an assertion which requires numbers. If 98% of firms submitting legal briefs are solo or small firms, then the above statement is untrue. The archetype if my prior sentence is true, would be not-small/solo firms.

The background data is also suspect.

https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/

"all documents where the use of AI, whether established or merely alleged, is addressed in more than a passing reference by the court or tribunal. Notably, this does not cover mere allegations of hallucinations, but only cases where the court or tribunal has explicitly found (or implied) that the AI produced hallucinated content."

While a good idea, the database is predicated upon news, or people submitting examples as well. There may be some scraping of court documents as well, it's not entirely clear.

Regardless, the data is only predictive of people getting called out for such nonsense. A larger firm may have such issues with a lawyer, apologize to the court, have more clout with the court, and replace the lawyer with another employee.

This is something a smaller firm cannot do, if it is a firm of one person.

It's a nice writeup, and interesting. But it does lead to unverified assertions and conclusions.

dmoy• 9 months ago

I dunno. By revenue, legal work in the US is super top heavy - it's like 50%+ done by the top 50 firms alone. That won't map 1:1 to briefs, but I would be pretty shocked if large firms only did 10% of briefs.

District5524• 9 months ago

That's an important observation. It's not easy to get filing data outside the US Federal courts (PACER), because it's not typical at all that courts publish the filings themselves or information on those who file the pleadings. But you can find statistics of the legal market (mainly law firms), like class size (0-10, 10-50, ... 250+ lawyers per firm) of total number of law firms, number of employees per class size of total law firm employees, or revenue per class size. Large firms only dominate the UK, especially in terms of revenue, US is less so, EU is absolutely ruled by solo and small firms. I did some research back in 2019 on this, updates, the figures probably did not change, see page 59-60: https://ai4lawyers.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Overview-of.... The revenue size statistics was not included in the final publication. You can fish similar data from the SBS dataset of Eurostat https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/main/data/database (But the statistical details are pretty difficult to compare with the US or Canada, using different methodologies, different terminologies.)

JumpCrisscross3• 9 months ago

AI lawyers, wielded by plaintiffs, are a godsend to defendants.

I’ve seen tens of startups, particularly in SF, who would routinely settle employment disputes, who now get complaints fucked to the tee by hallucinations that tank singularly the plaintiffs’ otherwise-winnable cases. (Crazier, these were traditionally contingency cases.)

Muromec3• 9 months ago

That is energent behavior (or as we used to say, the will of Allah). AI is doing so much work that it can't help itself but become pro-union.

JumpCrisscross3• 9 months ago

What?

lanyard-textile• 9 months ago

My lawyer.

Who used Claude, according to the invoice, and came to court with a completely false understanding of the record.

Chewed out by the judge and everything.

teekert• 9 months ago

I've met several people now (normies, forgive me the term) who use LLMs thinking they are just a better Google and never heard of hallucinations.

One person I spoke to used to write Quality Control reports, and now just uses ChatGPT because "It knows every part in our supply chain, just like that!"

Seems like some better warnings are in order here and there.

I only know how lawyers work from "Suits", but it looks like tedious, boring work, mainly searching for information. So an LLM (without knowing about hallucinations) probably feels like a god-send.

JumpCrisscross3• 9 months ago

I've met several people now (normies, forgive me the term) who use LLMs thinking they are just a better Google and never heard of hallucinations

Perhaps LLMs are the solution to elite overproduction?

blitzar• 9 months ago

How many hours of Claude @ $1,000/hour did they bill you for?

jbstack2• 9 months ago

I'm a legal professional who uses AI to help with my work.

I couldn't ever imagine making a court submission with hallucinated legal references. It seems incredibly obvious to me that you have to check what the AI says. If the AI gives me a case citation, I go into Westlaw and I look up and read the case. Only then do I include it in my submission if it supports my argument.

The majority of the time, AI saves me a lot of work by leading me straight to the legislation or case law that I need. Sometimes it completely makes things up. The only way to know the difference is to check everything.

I'm genuinely amazed that there are lawyers who don't realise this. Even pre-AI it was always drilled into us at law school that you never rely on Google results (e.g. blogs, law firm websites, etc.) as any kind of authoritative source. Even government-published legal guidance is suspect (I have often found it to be subtly wrong when compared to the source material). You can use these things as a starting point to help guide the overall direction of your research, but your final work has to be based on reading the legislation and case law yourself. Anything short of that is a recipe for a professional negligence claim from your client.

risyachka• 9 months ago

> I'm genuinely amazed that there are lawyers who don't realise this

Its not lawyers, its everyone.

literalAardvark• 9 months ago

Yeah but you don't really expect everyone to hold their work to a very high standard.

You do expect it from most professionals.

potato37328422• 9 months ago

Even government-published legal guidance is suspect (I have often found it to be subtly wrong when compared to the source material)

This is more often a feature than a bug in my experience.

jbstack2• 9 months ago

I tend to think it's neither, but rather an inevitable result of the lossy process of condensing legal text (which has been carefully written to include all the nuance the drafter wanted) to something shorter and simpler.

arcbyte• 9 months ago

I'm genuinely amazed that there are lawyers who don't realise this.

Just remember who the bottom half of your law school classmates were. Sometimes we forget those people.

collingreen• 9 months ago

Don't forget the top half, either. In my experience, the people willing to sit down and fully do the work every time like GP are pretty rare compared to the lazy but lucky/charming/connected top and the lazy but unlucky/outsider bottom.

Keep being a real one, GP. It's so hard to not become jaded.

fiveonthefloor• 9 months ago

Me. After spending $250,000 on incompetent lawyers in my divorce case who have a natural conflict of interest and who generally just phone it in, I fired them all and switched to Pro Se representation using ChatGPT’s $200 a month plan.

I can represent myself incompetently for nearly free.

Bonus. In my state at least, Pro Se representatives are not required to cite case law, which I think is an area that AI is particularly prone to hallucination.

By supplying a single PDF of the my state’s uniform civil code, and having my prompt require that all answers be grounded in those rules have given me pretty good results.

After nine months of battling her three lawyers with lots of motions, responses, and hearings, including ones where I lost on technicalities due to AI, I finally got a reasonable settlement offer where she came down nearly 50% of what she was asking.

Saving me over $800,000.

Highly recommended and a game changer for Pro Se.

Also “get a prenup” is the best piece of advice you will ever read on HN.

rimbo789• 9 months ago

On the pre-nup point, check the jurisdiction the marriage is in. I’m in Ontario, Canada, where pre-nups are much less powerful than people assume. For example you can’t use it to kick someone out of the family home nor can prenups determine access to children.

ProllyInfamous• 9 months ago

I've also been in a (albeit much smaller) civil lawsuit, as the pro se plaintiff, for about six months, in a small claims court.

Last week, I finally got an attorney to review a bunch of my LLM conversations / court filings, and it's been a good way to have saved a few thousand dollars (not having to fumble through explaining my legal theory to him — he can just follow along with my selected GPTs).

This was only because I got served a countersuit, and figured it was worth a few thousand dollars to not owe somebody on account of not entirely understanding civil procedure. Probably'll end up in Circuit Court, where being pro se is a terrible idea IMHO.

carson• 9 months ago

Steve Lehto has been covering some of the AI filings that have gone bad on his Youtube channel. They seem to be getting more frequent https://www.youtube.com/@stevelehto/videos

johnjames87• 9 months ago

"AI-tainted"

Dilettante_• 9 months ago

"Somebody tapped the tainted AI supply!"

iamleppert2• 9 months ago

This is a really easy problem to solve. You simply fetch those documents and add them to the context, or use another LLM to summarize them if they are too large. Then, have another fact checking LLM be the judge and review the citations.

otterley2• 9 months ago

Anyone who claims something is easy to solve should be held responsible for providing the working solution.

iamleppert2• 9 months ago

A child of 5 could do this! Now fetch me a child of 5!

more_corn• 9 months ago

That latter part is a bit harder than you think.

Who's Submitting AI-Tainted Filings in Court?

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