Butler Snow might be in a wee bit of trouble over in Alabama thanks to its attorney's alleged misuse of AI. The Guardian (U.K.) reported:
In less than a year and a half, Frankie Johnson, a man incarcerated at the William E Donaldson prison outside Birmingham, Alabama, says he was stabbed around 20 times.... In 2021, Johnson filed a lawsuit against Alabama prison officials for failing to keep him safe, rampant violence, understaffing, overcrowding and pervasive corruption in Alabama prisons. To defend the case, the Alabama attorney general’s office turned to a law firm that for years has been paid millions of dollars by the state to defend its troubled prison system: Butler Snow. State officials have praised Butler Snow for its experience in defending prison cases – and specifically William Lunsford, head of the constitutional and civil rights litigation practice group at the firm. But now the firm is facing sanctions by the federal judge overseeing Johnson’s case after an attorney at the firm, working with Lunsford, cited cases generated by artificial intelligence – which turned out not to exist. It is one of a growing number of instances in which attorneys around the country have faced consequences for including false, AI-generated information in official legal filings. A database attempting to track the prevalence of the cases has identified 106 instances around the globe in which courts have found “AI hallucinations” in court documents.
Last year, an attorney was suspended for one year from practicing law in the federal middle district of Florida, after a committee found he had cited fabricated AI-generated cases. In California earlier this month, a federal judge ordered a firm to pay more than $30,000 in legal fees after it included false AI-generated research in a brief. At a hearing in Birmingham on Wednesday in Johnson’s case, the US district judge Anna Manasco said that she was considering a wide range of sanctions – including fines, mandated continuing legal education, referrals to licensing organizations and temporary suspensions – against Butler Snow, after the attorney, Matthew Reeves, used ChatGPT to add false citations to filings related to ongoing deposition and discovery disputes in the case. She suggested that, so far, the disciplinary actions that have been meted out around the country have not gone far enough. The current case is “proof positive that those sanctions were insufficient”, she told the lawyers. “If they were, we wouldn’t be here....” Attorneys with Butler Snow were appointed by the Alabama attorney general’s office and are being paid by the state to defend Jefferson Dunn, the former commissioner of the Alabama department of corrections, in the case. Rest of article.
Oops.
36 comments:
Butler Snow is not the great law firm that it likes to think it is. I hope the judge throws the book at them. Every freakin' lawyer out there should print out and add to their client's file every single case that the attorney cites. If you can't pull up the citation and print the case, then the case does not exist.
This is only a mild example of how AI reliance is going to wreck a lot of people's lives. Not only was life better before AI, it was better before the internet.
She has been made the sacrificial lamb-
I would appreciate it if someone would explain to me why a lawyer would use AI for legal research rather than Westlaw or some other law-specific resource.
A lawyer told me I needed to start using ChatGPT for my website. Said he was using it heavily in his law practice. Um no. My writing might suck but it's my suckage and not AI's suckage. At least I won't come up with Jessup County in Mississippi.
Stop calling it AI.
The actual name is LLM.
It is not “creating” anything. It is using an algorithm to copy-paste info that has been scraped from the web.
Just the slow creeping competency crisis.
Garbage in, garbage out let's look at where the legal profession is heading https://futurism.com/the-byte/chatgpt-memory-loss-procrastination
We take amphetamines that we think make us smarter and more productive. We take steroids to look better. We use computer programs to do our work for us.
This is just the inevitable result of a culture of cheating and taking shortcuts.
For those of us still willing to put in the work, there is much opportunity to rise above the crowd, professionally and personally..
12:38 - That's for damned sure. I have researched AI tools to aid in my work, or to enhance ideas about doing that work. For example, it's handy for compiling powershell scripts but I research those scripts with the 'whatif' before I execute. Using it as a helpful tool is the best course. Some folks are trying to let it do their job and don't even get me started on how students are trying to breeze through college with it. It's absolutely the worst thing in the world since smartphones made us stop memorizing phone numbers.
Realtor / lawyer/ doctor / engineer here - AI can HELP you but it cannot DO the work. Love AI
Butler Snow may want to rethink his bio on their website: "Matt enjoys a challenge. His creativity and ability to work outside conventional norms allow him to solve difficult legal and business problems and to enjoy a diverse practice."
It is AI. LLMs falls under AI and "creating" is not necessarily part of AI. What you are referring to is Generative AI that attempts to create something. It also is much more advanced than copy-pasting info as what LLMs (again a subset of AI) do is attempt to learning language by using a neural network to compare and contrast words and their meanings that come next to or close to each other. It attempts to statically look at a language to understand how it is used. LLMs can copy-paste but it is much deeper than that. As if it only copied data and spit it back out then why were there cases in this example that didn't exist? In short, it wouldn't. The non existent cases are hallucinations of the collected data.
AI is the umbrella term that Machine Learning falls into and then you have the subset of Deep Learning where you are using a neural network to attempt to mimic the human brain in terms of reasoning, decision making, perception, etc. LLMs leverage neural networks to attempt to process and "understand" language which is all part of AI.
That DL Gardner guy should try using AI and then tell us how that works!
Matt enjoys a challenge. He's probably smart enough to know that before you can screw the pooch you first have to ketch it! His creativity and ability to work outside conventional norms allow him to solve difficult legal and business problems and to enjoy a diverse practice. Sometimes the difficult legal and business problems he needs to solve might even be problems he caused. It could be like a diy arson squad and he might even know that most firefighters know the best way to be the first hero to the fire is to start it yourself!
The lawyer in question begged the judge not to “punish my colleagues.”
Sorry, dude, but they’ve got decades of arrogance for which to atone. This has been a long time coming.
Was in a federal hearing the other day where the magistrate blasted a party's use of AI, finding the same bs.
I use AI a lot, but I've learned that it's hot garbage at legal issues. It often gives you the exactly wrong answers to legal questions.
Do the work, find and use the cites from the cases, then let AI clean up/edit the written product for you (this is only point that it saves you time), then re-check the quotes, cites, etc. Still saves the client time, but doesn't leave them out to dry using bad legal theory.
We use AI in my business to generate report summaries and develop other information. The AI response frequently includes citations for applicable regulations. Always always check the citations before signing.
@1:31 said
I bet you also call a remote controlled quad-rotor a “drone” and a flat panel TV a “flat screen”
I'm with 11:31. Why in the world would he not use Westlaw?
Lawyer here. Several times each week I receive emails and/or voicemails from a Westlaw rep pitching their "AI legal assistant" and calling it "a game-changer." Maybe it's the best thing since the Magna Carta, but I don't want to play that game. We're human and capable of making mistakes (even you Butler Snow), but I know better than to cite a case without actually reading it.
Can it look even worse for Butler Snow?
Sure it can!
Via Above The Law:
https://abovethelaw.com/2025/05/law-firm-tagged-over-fake-citations-quietly-deletes-blog-post-encouraging-lawyers-to-use-ai/
"But just the day before, Butler Snow had published a post on its site titled “Artificial Intelligence: I’m A Little Behind. Have I Missed the Train?” written by a lawyer entirely unrelated to this screw-up encouraging lawyers not to feel overwhelmed for avoiding the technology until now and to jump into the AI waters. The website address currently directs to a 404 Page Not Found, presumably after the firm doused every mention of artificial intelligence in their system with kerosene and lit the match. Thankfully, the Wayback machine preserved this moment in unintentionally hilarious timing for posterity."
Wayback link to deleted Butler Snow post: https://web.archive.org/web/20250515190720/https://www.butlersnow.com/news-and-events/artificial-intelligence-im-a-little-behind-have-i-missed-the-train
Well Mr. Reeves did get his law degree from the prestigious University of Tulsa law school. Just outside of the Ivy League, Tulsa is a hotbed of AI-generated law degrees and legal f**kuppery.
I was impressed with the titles until I saw "Realtor"
If I'm a client of Butler Snow, I am questioning every entry on my itemized bill.
One of many examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect. The saying goes, “you don’t know what you don’t know”. I am no attorney, but I can assure you that if I had AI cite caselaw, I would damn sure get on Westlaw to verify that case’s existence. I would also read a summary. On another note, if I found out I had been billed for time in which this garbage was proffered as real I would demand my money back. No way this took more than 5 minutes to produce. My $0.02.
"Not only was life better before AI, it was better before the internet."
Says the guy on the internet. (FYI, I DO NOT AND HAVE NOT EVER used AI.)
Will that shit pot that is the Mississippi Bar do anything additionally as a result of this case?
Why? It was in Alabama
@3:08 PM, any time I hear of anything that’s a “game changer,” my bullshit detector goes to screaming.
It would have taken minutes to check the citations. How do people let this happen?
There are certain attorneys whose every citation I check, whenever I come up against them, because they have proven themselves untrustworthy.
Malpractice; unethical conduct subject to bar disciplinary action; termination from law firm. I'm probably missing something.
tru dat. they've done an awesome job over the years of leveraging their political network - hiring them, hiring their children, doing free legal work, making huge (and hidden) political contributions to them. And making damn sure that the politicians remember to hire them for just about everything government uses lawyers for. Fifty years ago, it was a genuine blue chip law firm, with damn smart and skillful lawyers (even if they were arrogant). That changed over the years. The allure of big bucks from the political connections was too much to resist. The firm is GREATLY OVERRATED. IMHO.
BS exists so out-of-state GCs can cover their rear ends by hiring "the biggest" firm in Mississippi.
https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/community/criminal-justice/attorney-chatgpt-resigns-baltimore-jail-VZZ25D2LFJE5RM2XEFMSX3POYE/
And I suspect there will be a lot more fallout (and bad press) from this dick-dancing fuckup.
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