Perhaps we should forgive Covington attorney John R. Walker or, at least, be willing to afford him a little grace.<\/p>\n
He was admitted to the bar in 1983 and, as he notes in one filing, is a 43-year veteran of the legal profession.<\/p>\n
So it is perhaps easy to believe his explanation for mistakes he made<\/a> in a lawsuit involving the city of Mandeville. Walker says he didn\u2019t understand the \u201climitations and potential pitfalls\u201d of the cutting-edge tools he was using to help him write a legal brief. Plenty of folks struggle to adapt to new technologies.<\/p>\n But Walker\u2019s struggles with technology might get him fined or otherwise punished when he has to go before a judge next week. So what exactly did he do?<\/p>\n Per his own admission, Walker filed a motion in the case that, as is normal, included case law citations and quotations. But in writing the motion, he used two generative AI programs: Westlaw Precision AI and ChatGPT.<\/p>\n The programs, Walker said, \u201challucinated\u201d cases. Made them up out of whole cloth. And Walker didn\u2019t notice before filing.<\/p>\n U.S. District Judge Brandon Long was not amused.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Court has chosen to ignore most of Plaintiffs\u2019 arguments brought in its response motion because many, if not all, of Plaintiffs\u2019 case citations are to cases that do not exist, or, if they do exist, incorrectly quote from or inaccurately describe its facts and holding,\u201d he wrote in a ruling that went against Walker\u2019s client.<\/p>\n \u201cPresumably,\u201d Long continued, \u201cthis is the result of an astonishingly careless use of generative AI \u2026 A failure by licensed attorneys to perform even a cursory check to ensure their cited caselaw actually exists is wholly unacceptable.\u201d<\/p>\n To Walker\u2019s credit, he took full responsibility and threw himself on the mercy of the court.<\/p>\n \u201cI was new to using these tools and did not appreciate the limitations of and potential pitfalls in using such tools, including the risk that ChatGPT would \u2018hallucinate,\u2019\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n He vowed it would never happen again.<\/p>\n It would be easy, at this point, to dismiss the tale as just a one-off example of a lazy lawyer and the seductiveness of AI. But Walker is far from unique<\/a>.<\/p>\n The last three years have seen hundreds of documented cases of attorneys failing to check their AI-written briefs for fictional content worldwide, according to a database<\/a> maintained by French researcher Damien Charlotin.<\/p>\n