By Sara Merken
NEW YORK, Nov 13 (Reuters) - A federal judge in Oregon said he won’t impose formal sanctions on lawyers at U.S. law firm Buchalter who submitted a court filing that had fake case citations generated by artificial intelligence, finding their response to the incident sufficient.
U.S. District Judge Michael Simon in Portland in a Wednesday order said he was satisfied with the remedial actions that lawyers at Los Angeles-founded Buchalter laid out in court filings earlier this week. Those included donating $5,000 to a local organization that supports legal aid providers, reviewing internal firm safeguards to prevent AI misuse, and offering to reimburse any legal fees its client and opponents accrued due to the mishap.
Buchalter, a nearly 600-lawyer firm, is the latest large law firm to face scrutiny from a judge over apparent AI misuse. Law firms of all sizes, and individuals representing themselves in court, have increasingly come under fire for not reviewing the accuracy of material produced by AI systems.
A Buchalter spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday's order. In a statement earlier this week, the firm said its lawyer’s actions were “a clear violation of the firm’s strict and frequently reinforced policy regarding the use of generative AI.”
The judge last month had asked lawyers representing Green Building Initiative, an Oregon nonprofit that administers a green building certification, to explain why they should not be sanctioned for including two non-existent citations in a filing. Buchalter and co-counsel at Snell & Wilmer represent the nonprofit in a trademark dispute against Green Globe Limited.
One of the cases that was cited “is totally fake,” Simon said in the October 27 order, while the other “is almost real,” but the real case did not represent what the firm said it did. The judge also asked the lawyers to propose what they thought would be an appropriate sanction.
The Buchalter lawyers in responses filed on Monday apologized to the judge and explained that one of them, senior associate David Bernstein, used AI to help edit the document, and the tool inserted the two “hallucinated” citations without his knowledge.
Bernstein in a declaration said he had used AI to “improve the writing” in his brief after doing his own legal research, and did not expect it to inject any case citations. He acknowledged failing to carefully review the revised document and apologized to the judge and others involved in the case.
Bernstein and Buchalter lawyer Daniel Larsen did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday. Nor did their co-counsel from Snell & Wilmer, Thomas Speiss. Green Building Initiative and a lawyer for defendant Green Globe Limited did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
(Reporting by Sara Merken in New York)