Confronted with AI hallucinations in filings, one court shows 'justifiable kindness,' while another gets tough
Updated: Many federal courts are trying to teach lawyers a lesson for court filings with errors generated by artificial intelligence, but one recent case takes a kinder, gentler approach.
A federal magistrate judge in the Eastern District of New York refused to impose monetary penalties on a lawyer who submitted three hallucinated cases in a court filing, citing her “remorseful explanations” and “tragic personal circumstances.”
Imposing lesser sanctions, U.S. Magistrate Judge James M. Wicks admonished lawyer Suryia Rahman and directed her to give a copy of his Aug. 7 sanctions order order to her client, Sashane Hall, who is suing a charter school for an alleged abusive working environment and discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Wicks said AI-generated fake citations are apparently “plaguing the modern legal justice system.” But he refused to impose monetary sanctions, noting that Rahman’s husband had recently died.
Commenting on the case on LinkedIn, insurance coverage expert Dan D. Kohane of Hurwitz Fine said the court showed “justifiable kindness.”
Wicks’ approach stands in contrast to tougher sanctions imposed by judges, including a recent case in which a federal magistrate judge imposed a plethora of sanctions, including removing the lawyer as counsel of record for her client and requiring her to send the sanctions order to judges presiding in all of her cases.
Several other courts have imposed fines for AI hallucinations in court documents, Wicks said in his order. One lawyer was reported to the grievance panel of a federal appeals court. Other lawyers were required to send the court’s sanction order to their clients and to the judges to whom hallucinated cases were attributed, Wicks said.
Rahman explained her circumstances in a July 18 response to Wicks’ order to show cause. Rahman said she takes full responsibility for the fake cases obtained by a clerk who used Google for research. Rahman reviewed the draft document prepared by the clerk but admits she did not check citations.
“I believe the main reason for my failure is due to the recent death of my spouse, who died unexpectedly at 39 years old,” Rahman said in the response. “The shock and grief resulting from my husband’s death has had a profound impact on all aspects of my life. To address this, I have taken bereavement leave and am continuously meeting with medical and mental health professionals.”
Rahman also said she withdrew a claim under the New York State Human Rights Law, and the opposing counsel at Jackson Lewis stipulated to the voluntary dismissal. Other claims under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 are ongoing.
Rahman has never been subjected to discipline or sanctions, according to the order. “This conduct, while aberrant, appears to be an isolated occurrence,” Wicks wrote.
Wicks said the problem of hallucinated cases in lawyers’ court filings is “no longer in its nascent stage.”
AI-generated hallucinations also appear “to have unwittingly worked” their way into judicial decisions and orders, Wicks said, citing instances in which two federal judges withdrew opinions that included substantial errors.
Wicks cited another case in which a judge did not impose sanctions for citations to three nonexistent cases in a court document. In United States v. Cohen, U.S. District Judge Jesse M. Furman of the Southern District of New York declined to sanction former Trump attorney Michael Cohen and the lawyer representing him.
Furman said in the March 2024 opinion that Cohen’s lawyer had not acted in bad faith and Cohen had believed the cases were real. He had found them using Google Bard, which Cohen believed to be a “super-charged search engine” rather than an AI program.
The cases were cited in a bid for an early end to Cohen’s supervised release after his guilty plea to campaign finance violations and bank and tax fraud.
At the other end of the spectrum is a magistrate judge’s order, released after Wicks ruled, that “imposes the toughest of the penalties I’ve seen so far” for AI hallucinations, according to Kohane.
In an Aug. 14 order, U.S. Magistrate Judge Alison S. Bachus of the District of Arizona revoked an attorney’s pro hac vice status, removed her as counsel of record for her client, struck her opening brief with faulty citations, ordered her to send apology letters to three judges to whom she attributed fake cases, ordered her to send the order to the Washington State Bar Association for “any action it deems appropriate” and ordered her to transmit the sanctions order to every judge who presides over any case in which she is attorney of record.
The attorney subject to the order, Maren Bam, had filed a brief “riddled with fabricated, misleading or unsupported citations,” Bachus said.
Bam told Bachus that Social Security disability cases at her law firm are assigned to brief writers who are contract attorneys, and their case citations are spot checked by the supervising attorney. Bam reviews and edits briefs, relying on the work of the contract attorneys and the internal review process.
The contract attorney in the case was experienced and professional, Bam said. The case is Mavy v. Commissioner of the Social Security Administration.
Bam told the ABA Journal that she will appeal the sanctions.
The ruling “is not only shocking but sets an impossibly high, and frankly unworkable, standard for every practicing attorney, especially in a technology driven world,” Bam said in a press statement.
Bam said the decision wrongly treats AI-hallucinated citations as an automatic violation of Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
“The challenged sections of our brief were not frivolous. Every argument was still supported by valid, verifiable authority. Where a citation was later flagged, the underlying legal proposition was still supported by real law,” she said. “Those are issues that can be corrected, without striking the entire filing or removing counsel.”
In Rahman’s case, Wicks said he is aware of the serious implications of using AI-generated nonexistent cases. But he “is also mindful of the circumstances here which do not support any finding of bad faith, as well as the remorseful explanations proffered by counsel who experienced one of life’s unspeakable tragedies.”
Kohane told the Journal he has been following court decisions on hallucinated cases, and usually he has “little patience for lawyers who fail to review filings submitted under their signature. With more than 275 reported decisions, the lessons are clear: There are no valid excuses for failing to verify case law, quotations and precedent before submitting papers to the court.”
Shifting blame to associates or clerks “does not absolve responsibility. Indeed, that approach is inexcusable,” he says.
“At the same time, humanity and professionalism must remain at the forefront of judicial decision-making,” he says. In Rahman’s case, “the court appropriately recognized that compassion outweighed punishment. While the lawyer was required to disclose her errors to her client—a consequence humiliating enough—the court declined to impose further sanctions. From my perspective, this was justice tempered with grace. We should never lose sight of kindness and understanding, even as we uphold the highest standards of practice.”
O’Hagan Meyer senior counsel David Scriven-Young, who represents lawyers and other professionals in malpractice actions, sees lessons in Rahman’s case.
“No matter the circumstances, a supervising attorney has the responsibility to check the final work product of anything they are signing or which is being filed on their behalf,” he says.
Noting that the incident followed the loss of Rahman’s spouse, he says the case “further calls attention to the issue of mental health care of attorneys—that we all need to support each other and ensure that we all get the help that we need.”
Rahman did not immediately respond to the Journal’s emailed request for comment sent to her via her New York law firm, Gehi & Associates. Nor did she immediately reply to a message seeking comment left with her office. The Journal also sought comment from Jackson Lewis partner Adam G. Guttell, the opposing counsel in the case. He is on vacation with limited access to email, according to an automatic email reply.
Rahman’s case, Hall v. the Academy Charter School, was summarized by VitalLaw.
Updated Aug. 19 at 7:10 p.m. to include additional comments from Maren Bam.
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