Would you hire the lawyer who just got sanctioned for using AI? | Fortune

Lawyers across the United States are increasingly using artificial intelligence to draft briefs, but the results have been disastrous. In Alabama, a family lost a trust dispute because their lawyer cited non-existent cases, leading the state Supreme Court to bar the lawyer from filing without co-counsel. In Oregon, a federal judge sanctioned two lawyers $110,000 for submitting 23 fabricated citations and eight invented quotations, the largest AI hallucination penalty in American legal history. In Manhattan, a judge ruled that a defendant who used a general-purpose AI chatbot waived attorney-client privilege, exposing his defense strategy to government subpoena. Damien Charlotin's database shows over 1,300 global cases where courts have commented on AI-generated hallucinations. The author argues that general-purpose large language models like ChatGPT are unsuitable for legal work because they cannot verify the existence or accuracy of cited cases. The American Bar Association has identified five Model Rules of Professional Conduct impacted by AI use. The author contends that the structural problem is architectural, not a capability issue, and that the market will eventually price the profession's understanding that in law, the cost of a wrong answer is paid in someone's freedom, assets, or family's future.

(Source：Fortune)