Steven Schwartz, who used ChatGPT to write down a legal temporary, is pictured outside federal court in Manhattan on Thursday, June 8, 2023, in Latest York.
Molly Crane-Newman | Latest York Each day News | Getty Images
A Latest York federal judge on Thursday sanctioned lawyers who submitted a legal temporary written by the bogus intelligence tool ChatGPT, which included citations of non-existent court opinions and faux quotes.
Judge P. Kevin Castel said that the attorneys, Peter LoDuca and Steven Schwartz, “abandoned their responsibilities” after they submitted the A.I.-written temporary of their client’s lawsuit against the Avianca airline in March, and “then continued to face by the fake opinions after judicial orders called their existence into query.”
Castel ordered each LoDuca and Schwartz, together with their law firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman, to every pay $5,000 in fines. He also ordered them to notify each judge falsely identified because the creator of the bogus case rulings concerning the sanction.
“The Court won’t require an apology from Respondents because a compelled apology shouldn’t be a sincere apology,” Castel wrote in his order in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. “Any decision to apologize is left to Respondents.”
The judge, in a separate order Thursday, granted Avianca’s motion to dismiss the suit, which the attorneys filed on behalf of Roberto Mata, who claimed his knee was severely injured on an August 2019 flight to Latest York from El Salvador when he was hit by a metal service tray.
Castel said Mata’s suit was filed after the expiration of a two-year window allowed for legal claims related to international air travel under the Montreal Convention.
The judge said he may not have sanctioned the attorneys in the event that they had come “clean” about Schwartz using ChatGPT to create the temporary opposing Avianca’s motion to dismiss the suit.
But Castel said the lawyers exhibited “bad faith” by making false and misleading statements concerning the temporary and its contents after Avianca’s lawyers raised concerns that the legal citations within the temporary were from court cases didn’t exist.
“In researching and drafting court submissions, good lawyers appropriately obtain assistance from junior lawyers, law students, contract lawyers, legal encyclopedias and databases resembling Westlaw and LexisNexis,” Castel wrote in his order.
“Technological advances are commonplace and there’s nothing inherently improper about using a reliable artificial intelligence tool for assistance,” Castel wrote. “But existing rules impose a gatekeeping role on attorneys to make sure the accuracy of their filings.”
