Arizona court sanctions lawyer for AI-generated false citations
ppc.land
Judge revokes attorney's pro hac status and imposes multiple sanctions after majority of legal citations were fabricated by AI.

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/35742052

An Arizona federal court issued extensive sanctions against attorney Maren Bam on August 14, 2025, after finding that her brief contained multiple artificial intelligence-generated citations to non-existent cases. The sanctions include revocation of pro hac vice status, striking the brief, and mandatory notification to state bar authorities.

  • 9488fcea02a9@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    16·
    14 hours ago

    All the prior cases from these chatGPT lawyers should be reviewed. What other shortcuts were they taking before? Did an innocent person end up in jail because of some prior negligence?

    • druidjaidan@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      11 hours ago

      A very small minority of lawyers work criminal cases.

      This lawyer in particular only works on Social Security Disabilty claims.

  • danAEnglish
    441·
    20 hours ago

    I’m amazed that these lawyers are using things like ChatGPT, when better solutions exist for the legal industry. The big legal databases (like LexisNexis) have their own AI tools that will give you actual useful results, since they’re trained on caselaw from the database rather than just using a generic model, and link to the relevant cases so you can verify them yourself.

      • danAEnglish
        4·
        11 hours ago

        No, but law firms generally subscribe to these databases.

        At least where I live, lawyers can also go to the local law library to use LexisNexis for free.

  • skisnow@lemmy.caEnglish
    28·
    20 hours ago

    How naïve it was of me, to think that the New York Avianca case in 2023 was high profile enough for lawyers to have learnt their lesson, but nope, it’s getting worse each and every month that goes by:

    https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/

    It doesn’t help that the most common outcomes there are “Warning” or a fine in the low thousands. If a legal practice can save $500,000 a year on avoiding doing their own research, and the worse that’s likely to happen is “Warning” or a $2,000 fine, then why would they not?

    • Decq@lemmy.worldEnglish
      23·
      20 hours ago

      How are they not immediately disbarred for this? Surely fabricating documents and citations gets you disbarred right?

      • ToastedRavioli@midwest.socialEnglish
        20·
        19 hours ago

        It doesnt, but it should. Its malpractice of the highest degree and shows clear disregard for properly representing a client