NY Lawyer Busted Using ChatGPT To Create Phony Cases

A lawyer in New York is facing sanctions – and possibly worse – after he used the AI service Chat GPT to create a legal brief. The artificial intelligence bot created a list of fake court cases that the lawyer used in his brief, but he got busted when the opposing side couldn’t find any of the made up cases. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

A lawyer in New York is facing sanctions and possibly worse after he used the AI service ChatGPT to create a legal brief. The artificial intelligence bot created a list of fake court cases that the lawyer used in his brief. But he got busted when the opposing side couldn't find any of the cases, couldn't find any of the information that was in that brief because it was a big fraud. It was made up by AI. Right? This story, it's so ugly that it's crazy. It's laughable.
It really is.
But it's an ugly story. Right?
And it's so sad because you got this guy Steven Schwartz up in New York, 30 year lawyer. All right. We're not talking about somebody fresh outta law school, didn't know how to write a brief. Guy's been doing this for 30 years. He knows how to write a brief. And honestly sounded like he had a pretty good case there. You got somebody injured on an airplane by the, you know, cart. Sounds like pretty, pretty simple.
Truth is, he's not a bad lawyer. I mean, he really, let me just defend the guy. He's not a bad lawyer. But the AI spits out all of this stuff that AI made up and he doesn't, you know, we all get busy. He doesn't take the time to, wow, that's a great case. It's right on point and it's perfect for me. Oh wait, there are 10 perfect cases for me and it gives me the sites. Well, at some point, don't you say that doesn't look right? He got busy. I mean, that's really the truth. I if I were to drill down on this, that's all that happened here. But it's bizarre.
And you do feel bad a little for him because he says, listen, my kids had told me about ChatGPT. I thought it was a search engine. So I thought it was spitting out all these great cases related to what I needed. Cases like Martinez v. Delta Air Lines, Zicherman v. Korean Air Lines.
They're just made up.
Right. They don't exist. Those were not actual court cases.
Even the sites, even the sites that he uses when he says, judge, I wanna show you this case that is right on point with what I'm saying to you. You should rule for me because 10 cases here say that. Well, okay, if you go into a courtroom and you're loaded like that, buddy, you're ready to rock and roll. Right. Until somebody says, wait a second, judge, this is all made up. It's not real. I don't know. I kind of feel sorry for the guy. He just, you know, probably got busy, didn't take the time to do it. Should have had somebody else take a look at it. But this is what AI is capable of. Right?
Exactly. And that is what is terrifying about this because this is the natural evolution. This is not going to be the first lawyer that tries to use AI to write a legal brief. Like this is just the beginning. This is the opening of it. And we're gonna see it, I think we're gonna see it in the medical field. You know, doctors will say, okay, ChatGPT, I have, you know, increased heart rate, blah blah, blah. What do you got? And we're relying on it too much already. And it is so unreliable that it's terrifying.
Yeah. That's what this case is really about. If I were the judge, I would've really spent some time on the unreliability. Yeah. You gotta beat him up a little bit. He shouldn't have shown, he shouldn't have shown up with that. But, you can see how it could happen.

[cate]

I can't believe that they are making excuses for this attorney. If he was too busy, he shouldn't have taken the case. His client deserves better, and with 30 years as an attorney, he should know better.

[kertvangorder]

Just because he has been a lawyer for 30 years does not justify his intelligence.

[ZechsMerquise]

LegalEagle had a great video about this. It is much more weird than you think.

[davidvasquez]

Question, Is he a republican defense lawyer?

[agrimmon]

The irony of artificial intelligence is artificially making fools out of people

[RussiaisAriddle-ihbg]

The state bar will only give him a slap on the wrist... they protect criminals

[Luna_C]

I follow some LawTubers who have been covering this and the biggest issue wasn't that this lawyer got fooled by ChatGPT, it was that, when questioned, the lawyer doubled down on his excuses and didn't just own up to his mistakes.

[themeparkamusement]

As much as a lawyer chargers there is no excuse for this behavior he should have been busy working on the case he was getting paid for.

[jamesbluntirules]

Dennis Denuto. "It's the vibe you're honour." 😂😂

[deanfranz]

This was covered at REALLY extensive length by YouTuber Legal Eagle. It was brutal, when he was forced to answer for this in front of a judge (there's a transcript of his legal beating, very cringeworthy).

[jackychan]

It sounds like Skynet has sent a T-1000 to resolve a legal issue for human

[saltycrow]

This time I gotta respectfully disagree with Pap. I don’t think he was busy at all. I think he knew exactly what he was doing and had too much time on his hands.
Like they said he had a 30 year career.
He knew exactly what he was doing.

[victorblakey]

You feel sorry for the guy, being paid a lot of money, and not doing his job properly.

[austinb]

Shout out to Legal Eagle for explaining this last week. Pretty detailed explanation. Nice to see America's lawyer in his element too

[justinsinke]

Sigh...yes, there have been advances in AI. No, we are not at the level of sci-fi movies where you tell an AI what you want and it does all the work for you.

[stevedavis]

This was like when my brother and I were in Debate in high school. One of the experts we were using just happened to have the same name as my brother. When he got backed into a corner he would say “Well so and so says this and then spit out a quote that backed up what he was claiming. He only got called on it once and it was when a judge questioned his sources after the debate. He told the judge my name is so and so and I said it so I felt I could use it. Since he never claimed that the professor said it he was told it was dodgy but not breaking the don’t make up stuff rule.

[ScorpiusZA.]

LegalEagle did an excellent long version of this story, explaining it. It was hilarious because of how ridiculous whole the story is.

[anonymouslee]

Good lawyers be like: Bro do you even hire legal aides?

[ThatOpalGuy]

Did he do NO fact checking on the ai results?