The MyPillow guy's lawyers fined for error-riddled AI-generated court filing
MyPillow CEO and election conspiracy enthusiast Mike Lindell's legal team is in some hot water after submitting an AI-generated court filing, as reported by The New York Times. The legal brief was filled with errors, including misquotes of cited cases, misrepresentations of legal principles and references to cases that don't actually exist.
All told, the court identified around 30 major errors in the document. Colorado judge Nina Wang issued fines for the mistake-riddled filing, stating that attorneys Christopher Kachouroff and Jennifer DeMaster of the law firm McSweeney, Cynkar and Kachouroff had violated federal civil procedure rules and that they "were not reasonable in certifying that the claims, defenses and other legal contentions contained in [the AI brief] were warranted by existing law."
DeMaster and Kachouroff were fined $6,000 for the transgression. Lindell and MyPillow were not sanctioned for the improper filing, as the court noted that Kachouroff hadn't informed his client that he regularly uses AI tools like Microsoft CoPilot, Google Gemini and even Grok.
When questioned, the lawyers admitted they used AI to prepare the brief but claimed they accidentally submitted an earlier draft in which the mistakes had not yet been corrected. Kachouroff said they had a corrected brief at the time of submission, but couldn't provide any evidence to support the claim. The team requested that any potential disciplinary action against them be dismissed but the court declined, finding that the explanation regarding the AI-written brief was not compelling.
"Put simply, neither defense counsel’s communications nor the 'final' version of the [brief] that they reviewed corroborate the existence of the 'correct' version," Wang wrote. "[N]either Mr. Kachouroff nor Ms. DeMaster provide the Court any explanation as to how those citations appeared in any draft of the [brief] absent the use of generative artificial intelligence or gross carelessness by counsel."
The brief was initially presented back in February as the team defended Lindell in a defamation lawsuit brought forth by former Dominion Voting Systems employee Eric Coomer. A jury has since ruled in favor of Coomer.
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Of course, this isn't the first time lawyers have tried to cut corners with the use of AI. Multiple legal professionals have been caught inappropriately using artificial intelligence in the past couple of years, with many citing fake cases whipped up by tools like ChatGPT.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/the-mypillow-guys-lawyers-fined-for-error-riddled-ai-generated-court-filing-154859616.html?src=rss
