Attorneys balance use of powerful AI tools with risks - including legal hallucinations

"The 14-page motion looked like any standard court filing in a civil lawsuit. But on the sixth page of the motion, the attorneys cited legal authority from a case that does not exist - it was hallucinated by artificial intelligence. A San Diego judge wrote in October that she was "deeply troubled" by the conduct of the company's civil defense attorneys. She found they had filed multiple documents containing AI hallucinations."

""We can't just ignore generative AI, we have to become experts in the use so that we can avoid issues ... where hallucinated case law gets into final documents," Bryan McWhorter, a patent attorney and partner at the firm Knobbe Martens, said in an interview. "But I think when leveraged correctly, generative AI is frankly a power tool. It's going to allow me to produce higher-quality work product in less time and deliver that value to clients.""

"But even as legal watchdog groups have documented hundreds of AI hallucination cases in the U.S. and around the world, legal experts and attorneys say those cases are rare, arguing that AI is an important tool being put to good use throughout the legal profession, helping lawyers research case law, analyze evidence, draft contracts and complete any number of rote tasks."

Attorneys in San Diego filed a routine civil motion that contained a hallucinated legal citation generated by artificial intelligence. A San Diego judge described the attorneys' conduct as deeply troubled and identified multiple documents with AI-generated errors, such as citations to non-existent cases, fabricated quotes from real cases, and inaccurate citations to relevant authorities. Legal watchdog groups have documented hundreds of AI hallucination incidents worldwide, but legal experts describe such filings as relatively rare. Generative AI is widely used to research case law, analyze evidence, draft contracts and handle routine tasks, prompting calls for lawyers to develop expertise to prevent AI errors from entering final filings.

Read at The Mercury News