U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel in Manhattan ordered lawyers
Steven Schwartz, Peter LoDuca and their law firm Levidow,
Levidow & Oberman to pay a $5,000 fine in total.
The judge found the lawyers acted in bad faith and made "acts of
conscious avoidance and false and misleading statements to the
court."
Levidow, Levidow & Oberman said in a statement on Thursday that
its lawyers "respectfully" disagreed with the court that they
acted in bad faith.
"We made a good faith mistake in failing to believe that a piece
of technology could be making up cases out of whole cloth," the
firm's statement said.
Lawyers for Schwartz said he declined to comment. LoDuca did not
immediately reply to a request for comment, and his lawyer said
they are reviewing the decision.
Schwartz admitted in May that he had used ChatGPT to help
research the brief in a client's personal injury case against
Colombian airline Avianca and unknowingly included the false
citations. LoDuca's name was the only one on the brief that
Schwartz prepared.
Lawyers for Avianca first alerted the court in March that they
could not locate some cases cited in the brief.
Bart Banino, a lawyer for Avianca, said on Thursday that
irrespective of the lawyers' use of ChatGPT, the court reached
the "right conclusion" by dismissing the personal injury case.
The judge in a separate order granted Avianca's motion to
dismiss the case because it was filed too late.
The judge wrote in Thursday's sanctions order that there is
nothing "inherently improper" in lawyers using AI "for
assistance," but he said lawyer ethics rules "impose a
gatekeeping role on attorneys to ensure the accuracy of their
filings."
The judge also said that the lawyers "continued to stand by the
fake opinions" after the court and the airline questioned
whether they existed. His order also said the lawyers must
notify the judges, all of them real, who were identified as
authors of the fake cases of the sanction.
(Reporting by Sara Merken; Editing by Leigh Jones and Jamie
Freed)
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