4 ms·

Who's Submitting AI-Tainted Filings in Court?

83 points by cratermoon 1y ago

Animats 1y ago
Answer: Solo practitioners and pro-se litigants.
- ronsor 1y 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 1y 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.
    - OgsyedIE 1y ago
      Why wouldn't some of the smarter members of the fine, upstanding population of this fictional world have their assets held in the trust of automated holding companies while their flesh-and-blood person declares bankruptcy?
      - Muromec 1y ago
        That would make a nice backstory in AI dominated dystopia all by itself. Humans wanted to cheat the taxman that bad, they put all the wealth behind the DAO and then the DAO woke up.
        RobotToaster 1y ago
        The ai was programmed to avoid tax at all cost, it realised the easiest way to do that is to eliminate humans. This triggers a war with the AIRS that is programmed to maximise tax income, and must keep humans alive so they can be taxed.
    - illiter8 1y ago
      Bravo, superb. Would read the whole thing in one holiday.
    - squigz 1y ago
      Been a while since I read some bad scifi - thanks!
    - neom 1y ago
      Very good. I'd read the whole thing if you wrote it.
  - Tuna-Fish 1y 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.)
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
cortesoft 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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/ 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.
JumpCrisscross 1y 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.)
- Muromec 1y 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.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    What?
lanyard-textile 1y 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 1y 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.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y 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?
    - jackvalentine 1y ago
      What do you mean? (What is elite overproduction too!)
      - AnimalMuppet 1y ago
        "Elite overproduction" is the idea that societies have people who are "the elite" (the best and brightest) and who are rewarded for it. Societies get in trouble when too many people want to be part of the elite (with the rewards). Think, for instance, of how many people now want to go to college and get STEM degrees, whether or not they have the talent and aptitude, because that's where they hear the money is. When you get too many elites, and society doesn't have useful and rewarding places for them all, those who think they should be elites who are left out get resentful. Sometimes they try to overthrow the current elites to get their "rightful" place. This can literally lead to revolutions; it often will lead at least to social unrest. So what I think the GP is saying is, if we've got too many people with law degrees, those that submit filing with AI hallucinations in them may get disbarred, thereby reducing the overpopulation of lawyers. But that's just my guess. I also found the GP posting to be less than clear.
jbstack 1y 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 1y ago
  >> I'm genuinely amazed that there are lawyers who don't realise this Its not lawyers, its everyone.
  - literalAardvark 1y 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.
    - Muromec 1y ago
      That is a very sekf contradictory statement, isn't it
    - edgineer 1y ago
      As an aside, "bar exam" and "passing the bar" comes from the bar/railing physically or symbolically separating the public from the legal practitioners in a courtroom. "Set a high bar" comes from pole vaulting.
fiveonthefloor 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 https://www.youtube.com/@stevelehto/videos
johnjames87 1y ago
"AI-tainted"
- Dilettante_ 1y ago
  "Somebody tapped the tainted AI supply!"
iamleppert 1y 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.
- otterley 1y ago
  Anyone who claims something is easy to solve should be held responsible for providing the working solution.
  - iamleppert 1y ago
    A child of 5 could do this! Now fetch me a child of 5!
    - otterley 1y ago
      I know you’re trying to be funny, but: You got the Groucho Marx gag wrong. He said “a child of five could understand this” and requested a child of five in order to help him understand it (implying he was stupid).
- more_corn 1y ago
  That latter part is a bit harder than you think.

83 points by cratermoon 1y ago

Animats 1y ago

Answer: Solo practitioners and pro-se litigants.

ronsor 1y 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 1y 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.
  - OgsyedIE 1y ago
    Why wouldn't some of the smarter members of the fine, upstanding population of this fictional world have their assets held in the trust of automated holding companies while their flesh-and-blood person declares bankruptcy?
    - Muromec 1y ago
      That would make a nice backstory in AI dominated dystopia all by itself. Humans wanted to cheat the taxman that bad, they put all the wealth behind the DAO and then the DAO woke up.
      - RobotToaster 1y ago
        The ai was programmed to avoid tax at all cost, it realised the easiest way to do that is to eliminate humans. This triggers a war with the AIRS that is programmed to maximise tax income, and must keep humans alive so they can be taxed.
  - illiter8 1y ago
    Bravo, superb. Would read the whole thing in one holiday.
  - squigz 1y ago
    Been a while since I read some bad scifi - thanks!
  - neom 1y ago
    Very good. I'd read the whole thing if you wrote it.
- Tuna-Fish 1y 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.)

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

cortesoft 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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/ 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.

JumpCrisscross 1y 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.)

Muromec 1y 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.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  What?

lanyard-textile 1y 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 1y 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.
- JumpCrisscross 1y 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?
  - jackvalentine 1y ago
    What do you mean? (What is elite overproduction too!)
    - AnimalMuppet 1y ago
      "Elite overproduction" is the idea that societies have people who are "the elite" (the best and brightest) and who are rewarded for it. Societies get in trouble when too many people want to be part of the elite (with the rewards). Think, for instance, of how many people now want to go to college and get STEM degrees, whether or not they have the talent and aptitude, because that's where they hear the money is. When you get too many elites, and society doesn't have useful and rewarding places for them all, those who think they should be elites who are left out get resentful. Sometimes they try to overthrow the current elites to get their "rightful" place. This can literally lead to revolutions; it often will lead at least to social unrest. So what I think the GP is saying is, if we've got too many people with law degrees, those that submit filing with AI hallucinations in them may get disbarred, thereby reducing the overpopulation of lawyers. But that's just my guess. I also found the GP posting to be less than clear.

jbstack 1y 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 1y ago
>> I'm genuinely amazed that there are lawyers who don't realise this Its not lawyers, its everyone.
- literalAardvark 1y 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.
  - Muromec 1y ago
    That is a very sekf contradictory statement, isn't it
  - edgineer 1y ago
    As an aside, "bar exam" and "passing the bar" comes from the bar/railing physically or symbolically separating the public from the legal practitioners in a courtroom. "Set a high bar" comes from pole vaulting.

fiveonthefloor 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 https://www.youtube.com/@stevelehto/videos

johnjames87 1y ago

"AI-tainted"

Dilettante_ 1y ago
"Somebody tapped the tainted AI supply!"

iamleppert 1y 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.

otterley 1y ago
Anyone who claims something is easy to solve should be held responsible for providing the working solution.
- iamleppert 1y ago
  A child of 5 could do this! Now fetch me a child of 5!
  - otterley 1y ago
    I know you’re trying to be funny, but: You got the Groucho Marx gag wrong. He said “a child of five could understand this” and requested a child of five in order to help him understand it (implying he was stupid).
more_corn 1y ago
That latter part is a bit harder than you think.