How to Use ChatGPT to Ruin Your Legal Career

can you tell me about a lawyer who around and found out I'm sorry I can't find the information I'm only up to date through 2021 I have the information right here oh so AI is going to replace lawyers well not anytime soon because it finally happened we've had our first sighting of AI lawyering in the wild and it was um it was bad it was very very bad two lawyers in New York deputized Chad gbt to do their legal research and Airline tort casee and found themselves in a direct flight to sanctions land courtesy of

one very pissed-off federal judge these guys may have ended their legal careers for a case which was always Dead on Arrival and along the way they became internet famous bringing the entire legal Community together to point and laugh as one so thanks guys so our Story begins back in August of 2019 on flight 670 from San Salvador to New York's JFK Airport passenger Berto mat claims that an employee of Avianca Airlines quote struck him in his left knee with a metal serving cart causing him to suffer severe personal injuries in February of 2022 ma sued

in New York State Court alleging that he suffered quote Grievous and painful injuries to his body and Limbs and damage and injury to his nervous system and became sick sore lame and disabled causing him to be incapacitated which is a lot of hassle for a bag of pretzels at a warm Sprite now aanka removed the case to Federal Court immediately which means that the New York County Clerk took no action and simply transferred it to the southern district of New York which is a federal court uh where the suit was assigned to US District Judge

Kevin Castell not every case qualifies for what's called Federal removal but here aanka cited multiple separate grounds for article 3 jurisdiction to get it into the federal courts now first international flights are governed by something called the Montreal Convention and international treaty signed by the US government and second the parties are what's called diverse uh because Mr ma is a citizen of New York and aanka is headquartered in bota Colombia federal court have original jurisdiction over cases which implicate International treaties and they have diversity jurisdiction when the plaintiff inde defendant are not from within the

same state so this suit was clearly one which could be heard in federal court in New York now the Montreal Convention is an international treaty signed in 1999 to standardize legal protections for air Travelers mainly by regularizing compensation for lost luggage but it also contains a 2-year statute of limitations reckoned from the day of arrival at the destination and you'll note that February of 2022 is more than 2 years years after August of 2019 which meant that Mr ma was probably out of time and out of luck but immediately upon removal aanka filed an answer

denying all the allegations and Ma's admittedly barebones complaint although the airlines conceded that quote a Roberto ma was listed as a passenger on aanka flight 670 on August 27th 2019 and aanka asserted several affirmative defenses which is something that negates criminal or civil liability even if the facts alleged are true so for instance aan claimed that if Mr ma was injured it was as a result of either his own negligence or actions by another passenger but for our purposes we only care about two legal issues raised in the answer the first is that the airline

noted that it filed for bankruptcy way back in 2020 and Ma as a creditor had already missed his window to present a claim for monetary damages to the bankruptcy court and second oban's lawyers argued quote pursuant to article 35 of the Montreal Convention plaintiff's claims are barred because this action was commenced more than two years after the plaintiff arrived at his destination accordingly plaintiff cannot sustain a claim under the Montreal Convention now this put modest Council in a pickle because it's what lawyers call blackletter law that they'd waited 6 months too long to sue the

airline and that's even before you get to the bankruptcy issue but luckily the attorneys had an ace up their sleeve because while the defense attorneys had the law on their side the plaintiff's attorneys had chat GPT now there's been a lot of talk lately about the potential for AI to revolutionize the practice of law most famously entrepreneur Joshua Browder CEO of the online task platform do not pay offered $1 million to any lawyer who would argue a Supreme Court case wearing an earpiece and speak the script produced by the company's chatbot a version of chat

GPT uh that obviously never happened because was incredibly stupid which we've covered on this channel now GPT stands for generative pre-trained Transformer and it's a type of large language model an llm that scans vast quantities of data and then is trained to synthesize responses to questions using predictive modeling now in its simplest form a chat bot will answer your question by predicting what word comes next based on the information called from from whatever data set that it was trained on and chat GPT in particular is an AI chatbot released to the public by the research

laboratory open AI in November of 2022 the problem however when it comes to the practice of law is that right now chat Bots are still prone to what are called hallucinations or if you want to get technical they just make stuff up sometimes and they can even be trained to lie something that Browder actually bragged about in December he tweeted that he trained his chat gbt plug-in to lie to a cable company in a service called the AI just exaggerated Internet outages similar to how a customer would a customer who was okay with lying to

another human being I guess facing blowback from legal authorities for practicing law without a license Browder eventually retreated and pulled most of the offerings which could be classified as legal documents off of his site and although it's still build as the world's first robot lawyer but obviously that wasn't going to be the end of the matter right now lawyers are already using artificial intelligence to sort through reams of Discovery documents and it's probably inevitable that one day there will be models able to sort through case law and statutes effectively to help with legal research but

as Roberto Ma's lawyers discovered that day is not today because in January of 2023 aanka filed a motion to dismiss the case citing the 2-year statute limitations under the Montreal Convention and the pending bankruptcy now Ma's lawyer Peter Luka filed an opposition arguing that New York State's three-year statute limitations Trump to the Montreal convention's two-year cap or alternatively that ayan's bankruptcy told that his paused the statute limitations and thus there was still time uh for modest claim now as a lawyer I can tell you that this is a rather odd argument the Montreal Convention exists

to allow International businesses which operate in multiple countries to standardize their practices so they don't have to worry about dozens of different sets of local laws and would defeat the whole purpose of the treaty signed by the US government to allow individual states to impose their own regulations and statute limitations on the Airline carriers who happen to sell tickets to one of their residents nevertheless Luka argued that Ma was entitled to file in New York state court and thus New York's three-year statute limitations applied to his claim he wrote quote it was the defendant aanka

who chose to remove the action to this court the federal court at which point the action was already commenced in a timely manner both federal and state courts alike have continually held that the Montreal Convention does not preempt state law remedies and that plaintiffs are entitled to choose the Forum in which to bring their claim and in support of this argument Luka cited several Federal Court decisions including one from the fifth circuit caption vargi versus China Southern Airlines and one from the 11th circuit called zerman versus Korean Airlines now aian is represented in this dispute

by a law firm called conon foresight which specializes in aviation law and you can bet their bottom dollar that these guys probably know the Montreal Convention inside and out so it might have come as a surprise to them to read a quotation from the fifth circuit saying that a bankruptcy filing told the statute limitations under the Montreal Convention but as you've probably already guessed neither the vargi decision or the zerman decision actually exist I got the worst attorneys and neither do at least three of the other cases cited in the Luka filing and in reply

ayan's lawyers wrote quot although plaintiff off sensibly cites to a variety of cases in opposition to this motion the undersign has been unable to locate most of the cases cited in plaintiff's affirmation in opposition and the few cases which the undersigned has been able to locate do not stand for the propositions for which they are cited which is basically lawyers speak for you're in huge trouble now you're watching this video which which means that you already know that many of these cases are not real now there are a couple of possibilities here one is that

some of the lawyers could have asked chat GPT to write the brief or portions of it and chat GPT cited to fake cases the lawyer also could have just made them up uh lawyers write placeholder arguments all the time and then scrap them when the legal research turns out the wrong way but given that the original brief cites case names with reallook citations it's likely that the lawyer just used chat PT just didn't check the work that was generated now we'll get to that in just a second and that's when all hell broke loose because

on April 11th judge Castell issued a show cause order giving Luka a week to hand over the text of the decisions in vargi zerman and the Seven other cases claiming to be quote out of the office on vacation Luka requested and got an extra week to produce the opinions now a couple things to note New York judges are in the habit of just scribbling their answer on the motion itself New York is just weird that way there are some other jurisdictions that do that too sometimes it's just easier to just write stuff down on the

thing that's presented to you uh but also uh if you are printing real opinions off of Westlaw or Lexus or any of the other legal databases that real lawyers use all the time uh the task that was requested takes about 20 to 30 seconds it does not require an extra week to complete uh that's what we call foreshadowing now a show cause order or order to show cause is an order from the judge that basically give me your best defense as to why I shouldn't sanction you and that's what this uh briefing was all about

so on April 25th Luka produced an affidavit stating that he was annexing eight of the demanded decisions but that the attached production quote may not be inclusive of the entire opinions but only what it made available by online database which is um that's not how humans let alone lawyers talk um it's the kind of thing that you write when you're hiding something and he said that he had been able to locate the zerman opinion at all uh and that's not good either and in fact this whole response is just nonsense it is trivially easy to

locate a federal court decision particularly if you have the case site you can download these decisions off the federal judiciary's website via Pacer you can get it for free from Google Scholar you can take a field trip to your local library and pull the appropriate volume off the shelf and snap a picture of it on your phone if you want to and if you can't locate a federal case that's because a doesn't exist now let's take a moment and talk about case citations now I know this is going to sound incredibly boring but I promise

you this is going to pay off in a huge way later on in this video now a case citation is something to let the court or opposing Council know what case you are citing and where and really it's just three things it's a number a couple of letters in the middle and another number now let's start with the thing in the middle that usually refers to the reporter in which the case appears now a reporter is a set of books literal actual physical books uh that you could find in any law library that contains a

whole bunch of cases that's generally what a law library is there for it's a compendium of all the cases that are out there and here we're talking about Federal cases so if we look at the fake Citation for vazi it has an F in the middle and that F stands for the federal reporter that is the volume of books that contain all of the federal cases in particular the federal appeals court opinions and it contains all of them and in fact there are so many of them that the 3D refers to the Third edition of

the federal reporter I.E newer cases than you might find in the second edition and older cases than you might find in the fourth edition and then the first number refers to the volume so 9925 would be the 925 volume of the federal reporter like I said there are a lot of these books and then the second number is the page number of the volume so 1339 is Page 1339 of book 925 easy you're already smarter than these lawyers and since you rarely actually look it up in the physical book you just plug those numbers and

letters into a search bar of a legal database or even Google Scholar and Bam you go straight to the case it's really really easy so basically there's no defense for them not plugging the citation in and finding the actual cases and reading them and we'll get to the completely fabricated opinions in a second but the fact that they couldn't even find one of the decisions is a terrible result in and of itself in all my years of practice I have never filed anything without checking every single case citation to make sure that it is what

it reports to be lawyers crib from other lawyers all the time and you can never assume that the prior lawyer did their research you have to go back read the cases and make sure that not only do they say what they're being cited for but that there isn't some other part of the decision that's devastating for your case not to mention you have to make sure that that case hasn't been overturned later on so the fact that you can't find a case means that you didn't do your homework the first time around when this thing

was submitted to the court very very bad but second of all even a cursory examination of these cases would be enough to tell a practicing attorney that they were very clearly not real and not just because of the bizarre pagination shifting fonts and apparently handwritten characters in the middle of the text uh as the opening arguments podcast pointed out the varesi decision supposedly out of the 11 circuit is credited to judges Jordan Rosen Bal and Higginbotham and while judges Jordan and Rosen Bal do in fact sit on the 11th circuit uh judge Patrick hickinbotham is

a senior judge on the fifth circuit and similarly the plaintiff is descri described as Susan varesi personal representative of the estate of George scaria varesi and then a page later as a Nish varesi and any amount of digging into these cases would prove that they were fake not least because the internal citations that is the cases they refer to are mostly like the zerman case that Luka couldn't find are just made up and it's not a coincidence that the two real decisions are upwards of 25 pages long single spaced and in tiny font which is

generally how long cases tend to be especially in the federal circuit court of appeals in the fifth and 11th circuits while the cases that the plaintiff cited clock in at around five pages or less which is just about the outer limit of what chat GPT will produce and practically written in crayon but ayan's lawyers at Condon are professionals and clearly they didn't want to gild the Lily here so they just responded the next day with a polite letter to the court saying quote respectfully submitting that the authenticity of many of these cases is question questionable

so this occasioned a second show cause order from Judge Castell who was clearly good and mad at that point and he wrote quote the court is presented with an unprecedented circumstance a submission filed by a plaintiff's council in opposition to a motion to dismiss is replete with citations to non-existent cases six of the submitted cases appear to be bogus judicial decisions with bogus quotes and bogus internal citations set forth below is an order to show cause why plaintiff's council ought not be sanctioned and the judge went on to say that he called up the 11th

circuit himself and confirmed that there is no varesi opinion and he went through all of the bogus internal citations in the fake varesi opinion that Luka submitted to the court uh he told Luka to show up on June 8th and explain why he shouldn't be in deep deep trouble now as a lawyer seeing the mistakes made by these attorneys is honestly extremely hard to watch because it didn't have to be that way there are great lawyers all over the country and now my firm the eagle team is accepting new clients if you've been in a

train wreck like these lawyers or suffered a data breach or dealt with medical malpractice we can represent you or help find you the right attorney who can just click on the link in the description for a free consultation with my team because you don't just need a legal team you need the eagle team just click on the link below so three weeks later Luda filed an affidavit with the court in which he explained that he'd done none of the legal work on this case despite his name being on the filings now that's not terribly unusual

it looks like what happened here is he was acting as local counsel which means that if you're an out of state attorney with a client but you need someone with a law license in a particular State you reach out to someone who sort of double checks things and files the actual filings and Luka explained that it was instead Steven Schwarz one of his colleagues at the law firm of levow levow and Oberman uh had been responsible for the case from the beginning only Schwarz wasn't licensed to appear in federal court so when the case was

removed from State Court he continued to do the work and let Luka take the credit which is uh not a great excuse even though Luka says he's been practicing law with for since 1996 and had no reason to doubt his buddy's abilities but the thing is as an attorney you are responsible for absolutely everything that has your name and signature on it and frankly ayan's Motion in March saying hey we can't find these cases on Westlaw following the Court's order to produce them probably would have prompted any reasonable lawyer to check the case sites himself

before submitting them to the court with a notorized affidavit swearing that they were good and Luka's affidavit was accompanied by an affidavit from Schwarz stating that qu it was in consultation with the generative artificial intelligence website chat gbt the your affiant did locate and cite the following cases in the affirmation and opposition submitted which this court has found to be non-existent uh Schwarz then threw himself on the mercy of the court for his mistake in relying quote on the legal opinions provided to him by a source that has revealed itself to be unreliable he explained

that he'd never Ed chat gbt to do legal research before and was quote unaware of the possibility that its content could be false uh Schwarz said that Luka had nothing to do with his grew up and that he had quote no intent to deceive this court nor the defendant he finished by saying that quote he greatly regretted having utilized generative artificial intelligence to supplement the legal research performed herein and will never do so in the future without absolute verification of its authenticity Schwarz also attached undated screenshots of him allegedly asking chat GPT if varesi was

real and being assured that they absolutely were which is you know again again not how you research let alone a ninth grade essay about mating habits of pandas much less a legal brief submitted in federal court but by now all of law Twitter was losing its mind in the insane spectacle courtesy of Mike Dunford who popularized this total debacle and judge Castell was volcanically Furious and the next day the court entered a third show cause order commanding Schwarz and the levow law firm to get themselves down to the courthouse along with Luka to explain what

the hell was going on and why they shouldn't be all sanctioned for their activities and he added a new demand to know why they shouldn't be punished for quote the use of a false and fraudulent notorized avit filed on April 25th because some of the documents require that the signature line be authenticated by a witness who has demonstrated that he or she is a person in good character now typically that witness is called a notary public and they've been licensed by the state to verify with his special stamp or seal that the document was signed

in their presence by the person whose name appears on it and Luka's April 25th affidavit accompanying the fake cases he submitted to the court was notorized by Schwarz which is weird even taking into consideration that lots of attorneys in New York maintain a notary certification because every other document in plaintiff's case was notorized by the same levow pargal but this document in which Luka seems to take responsibility for what looks like fraud on the court perpetrated by Schwarz is notorized by by Schwarz himself and even weirder it's dated January 25th not April 25th but as

we discussed the cases they submitted to the judge were weird the formatting was wrong they were very short they have the wrong judges the parties are wrong and the analysis is basically nonsense basically getting caught citing to fake cases they then took all that time to write the cases out as best they could it's hard to say uh but the lawyers say that they asked chbt for the underlying cases and when they got back a small amount of text they thought it was giving them excerpt from real cases um which still is not a defense

you need the entire case to be able to be sure that it stands for what you're citing it for but that's beside the point at base though it's clear that no one checked or read the cases that were cited when they wrote the original brief and we also know that the fabricated cases were not created until the court asked the lawyers to look into them which is bad it's extremely bad so at this point it dawned on the plaintiff's lawyers that something very bad was about to happen the whole Squad of outside lawyers entered their

appearances on behalf of Schwarz and levow on one hand and Luka on the other and these lawyers very gingerly suggested that if the court was in a mood to postpone the June 8th hearing they'd sure appreciate a few extra days to get up to speed now uh judge Castell testly replied to Schwarz and Low's request by granting them two extra days for their written reply noting that the hearing remains scheduled for June 8th 2023 and his reply to Luka was even more ominous stating Mr Luka is different ly situated for Mr Schwarz and the firm

he has availed himself of a full and fair opportunity to respond to the Court's osc regarding non-existent case law and three possible grounds for sanctions he is not entitled to a doover so the lawyers filed their response and they basically doubled down on the theory that Schwarz was too dumb to be mendacious and Luka just wasn't paying attention and the judge then called the hearing and made both of these attorneys actually take the stand and testify under oath oh my God now before I get to what happened in court I need to teach you a

new word it's a word that my German friends explained to me a few years back and my God does it apply here the word is fr Shaman in other words to feel secondhand embarrassment or to feel ashamed about something someone else has done to be embarrassed uh because someone else has embarrassed themselves so with that new vocabulary word in mind let's look to what happened at the hearing and thanks to the Inner City Press we know roughly what happened in court and judge Castell asked Luka to testify first so judge Castell asked Luka under oath

what was your understanding of your obligation in connection with your March 1 submission under rule 11 Luka responds to be factual and truthful I relied on my colleagues Steven Schwarz with me at levow levo and Oberman did you do anything other than sign your affirmation did you read any of the cases no did you do anything to make sure that these cases existed no then aanka replied I did not read it later on the judge asked do you recall writing to me you were going on vacation and the court giving you until April 25th yes

was it true that you were going on vacation no judge uh Pro tip uh boy do not lie to the judge ever uh either verbally or in writing just don't do it because otherwise uh you might have to admit that you lied to the judge under oath the judge asked you did not see this was a bogus case no you see that it was in different fonts a little bit larger uh who typed this I believe it was Mr Schwarz and again I'll note acting as basically local councel it wasn't crazy that another lawyer was

doing most of the work here but uh when that lawyer submits a filing and signs it they are responsible for everything that's in that filing ah boy not a good look and with that background Schwarz then takes the stand and judge Castell asks how many cases have you done a thousand yes how do you conduct legal research I research cases do you read them yes the judge asked did you prepare the March one memo yes I used fast case but it did not have Federal cases that I needed to find I tried Google I had

heard of chat GPT all right what did it produce for you I asked it questions about the Montreal Convention or the position you wanted to take yes for our position you were not asking for an objective view but cases to support your position I asked it for its analysis did you ask Chachi BT what the law was or only for a case to support you it wrote a case for you do you cite cases without reading them no what caused your your departure here I thought chat gbt was a search engine and uh basically what

you can see here is that there was no good answer yes he has to claim that he reads all the cases but he clearly didn't read the cases here the judge catches him in a lie and he basically has no defense or at least no good defense here because even if chat GPT was a search engine he didn't read the underlying cases and as a result he cited a bunch of fake cases and on top of that the chat gbt transcripts that were provided to the court continually say that it cannot provide legal advice and

it's a language model and cannot access real-time legal databases or provide up toate case law and the thing about case law is it has to be up to dat and then days later fabricated a bunch of cases possibly using chat GPT uh and that's not going to save him here and that's why the judge leans in did you look for the vargi case yes I couldn't find it and yet you cited it in your filing I had no idea chat GPT made up cases I was operating under a misperception Mr Schwarz I think you were

selling yourself short you say you verify cases I I I thought there were cases that could not be found on Google six cases none found on Google this non-existent case vargi the excerpt you had was inconsistent even on the first page can we agree that's legal gibberish I see that now I thought it was exerpts man you can cut the F Shaman with a knife right now judge Castell continues aanka put your cases in quotations you know what f3d means right to which Schwarz replies federal district third Department no we went over this it's a

book that contains cases I have one right here look it's the federal reporter this is the second edition it contains a bunch of cases the things you're supposed to read before you submit stuff to federal court it's not a federal district it's definitely not the third department so the judge then asks have you heard to the federal reporter he says yes the judge asks that's a book right correct glad we're on the same page finally the judge goes in for the kill one more time and asks so you were the one going on vacation returning

on April 18th yes when you saw the Court's order it wanted to see the cases did it cross your mind that the court checked for the cases I wanted to comply and the judge continues you told me that chaty PT supplemented your research but what was it supplementing I used Fast case at the beginning Chachi BT wasn't supplementing your research it was your research right yes yeah so the media has talked about how this is lawyers using chat GPT and things going arai but what it's really revealing is that these lawyers just did an all-around

terrible job and it just happened to tangentially involve chat GPT there are no good answers here and so the judge summarized at the end okay some final comments I'll be taking this under advisement and entering a written decision it's been called a mistake but there's more the record will reflect whether that put Mr Schwarz and Mr Luka on actual notice that their cases were non-existent Mr Luka was asked for the cases we know what he did and Mr Schwarz did man I just want to die and I wasn't even involved in this case FR Shaman

man rip now I've always been skeptical about AI lawyers on this channel but hey it can't be worse than these two Mr Schwarz and Mr Luka probably would have benefited from today's sponsor 880,000 hourss they are non profit that helps people find careers that aim at solving the world's most pressing problems like artificial intelligence might be in 80,000 hours has been researching the worst case risks from Ai and they have tons of in-depth material on their website about whether these risks are real and how seriously we should take them what an AI caused existential catastrophy

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