Lawyers Barred for A.I.-Generated Citations to Fake Cases

Source Domain: www.nytimes.com

A federal judge in Mississippi has punished all four lawyers on opposing sides in a civil trial and canceled the proceedings after some of them, relying on artificial intelligence, cited fake legal cases in court filings.

Two of the lawyers have been barred for two years from appearing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi for their conduct, while all four were removed from the case and fined.

The case stemmed from a 2023 breach of contract lawsuit over legal fees that Tom Withers III, a Louisiana lawyer, claimed he was never paid by the city of Aberdeen, Miss., connected to a solar power development project.

Mr. Withers was not one of the lawyers who was disciplined, but both attorneys who were representing him in the case, Kathleen M. Wilson and Shauncey Hunter Ridgeway, were punished, as well as two lawyers for the city, Kathryn Y. Williams and Mark McClinton.

In an order filed on Monday, Sharion Aycock, a senior U.S. District Court judge, wrote that the four lawyers had violated Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure when they certified that the information in their filings was factual.

“This case presents the court with an unusual scenario — attorneys for both litigants engaged in similar sanctionable conduct,” Judge Aycock wrote.

The case is emblematic of the conundrum that many institutions are facing over the use of artificial intelligence for both research and written materials, including in the judicial system, the business world and academia.

In April, an elite Wall Street law firm apologized to a federal judge for submitting a court filing replete with errors created by artificial intelligence.

In the Mississippi case, the disciplinary actions were reported earlier by 404 Media and Robert Freund, a lawyer who tracks the misuse of A.I. in legal cases.

Both Ms. Wilson and Ms. Williams acknowledged during a hearing in January that they had not verified the authenticity of some of the cases they referred to in court…

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