Sanctions imposed for 'collective debacle' involving AI hallucinations and 2 firms, including K&L Gates
A special master has imposed a $31,100 sanction against K&L Gates and a second law firm for submitting a brief with “bogus AI research.”
In a decision filed May 6, retired U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael R. Wilner of the Central District of California imposed the monetary penalty, struck the deficient brief, and barred further discovery on the issue that it addressed.
Wilner, who is serving as a special master in the litigation, imposed the sanctions jointly and severally against K&L Gates and the second firm, Ellis George.
Wilner did not sanction the individual attorneys involved in the mishap, however.
“This was a collective debacle and is properly resolved without further jeopardy,” Wilner wrote.
The Verge covered the order, noted in Bluesky posts here and here. The Volokh Conspiracy published part of the sanctions order.
The incident “shows that all firms, however large and respected, need to be extra careful about having all their submissions thoroughly checked,” wrote Eugene Volokh, a professor emeritus at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law, at the Volokh Conspiracy.
K&L Gates and Ellis George represented a plaintiff in an insurance-related civil action. One of the issues in the litigation was the insurer’s assertion of various privileges in discovery. The supplemental brief addressed in camera review of some of the disputed documents.
Trent Copeland, a lawyer at Ellis George, had used artificial intelligence tools to prepare an outline for the supplemental brief. It contained the “problematic legal research,” Wilner said.
Copeland sent the outline to lawyers at K&L Gates, who incorporated the material into the brief without fact-checking or reviewing the research. They were not aware that Copeland had used AI to prepare the outline, “nor did they ask him,” Wilner wrote.
“According to my after-the-fact review,” Wilner wrote, “approximately nine of the 27 legal citations in the 10-page brief were incorrect in some way. At least two of the authorities cited do not exist at all. Additionally, several quotations attributed to the cited judicial opinions were phony and did not accurately represent those materials.”
Wilner said he had emailed K&L Gates lawyers when he turned up two inaccurate citations in his initial review of the brief. The lawyers refiled the brief without the incorrect citations, but other AI-generated problems remained.
“An associate attorney sent me an innocuous email thanking me for catching the two errors that were ‘inadvertently included’ in the brief and confirming that the citations in the revised brief had been ‘addressed and updated,’” Wilner said.
Wilner didn’t discover that the brief’s errors were generated by AI until he issued an order to show cause why sanctions shouldn’t be imposed. The lawyers’ declarations submitted in response “included profuse apologies and honest admissions of fault,” Wilner said.
Copeland took responsibility for the deficient outline in a declaration.
“This problem began with me—full stop—in my failure to advise my colleagues that a preliminary outline I forwarded to them had relied, in part, on the use of generative AI capabilities found in CoCounsel and Westlaw Precision and Google Gemini,” he wrote. “I am both deeply apologetic and embarrassed by this error.”
Wilner said the use of AI “affirmatively misled me.”
“I read their brief, was persuaded (or at least intrigued) by the authorities that they cited, and looked up the decisions to learn more about them—only to find that they didn’t exist. That’s scary,” he wrote. “It almost led to the scarier outcome (from my perspective) of including those bogus materials in a judicial order. Strong deterrence is needed to make sure that attorneys don’t succumb to this easy shortcut.”
Copeland did not immediately respond to an ABA Journal email requesting comment. Nor did the managing partner of Ellis George immediately respond to the Journal’s request. There was also no immediate response to emails requesting comment sent to two K&L Gates partners whose names appeared on court documents.
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