No one likes to get sanctioned. No one likes to have their name sullied in public, or be compelled to pay $5,000 to the other side and another $1,000 to the court.
But sometimes, you just have to let it be. Rather than appeal the thing and result in a published opinion like this one.
It's yet another opinion about AI-generated briefs. (Anyone starting to get the message on that?) This time from a firm that used a contract attorney and didn't check his work -- amongst other problems.
Not only does the law firm and its attorneys lose the appeal, but it results in an opinion that includes the following representative content:
"The [trial] court compared quotations from the opposition to existing legal authority and stated, LLG “repeatedly and seriously misrepresent[s] the holdings of these and other cases” and “blatant misrepresentations appear throughout the brief.” The court pointed out, “the brief contains no fewer than eight fabricated quotations that purportedly appear in cases cited by” LLG and stated, again in bold font, “Literally every other purported quotation from a case in the brief is similarly fictitious.” The court expounded: “If these fabricated quotations were created by the use of a generative artificial intelligence tool such as ChatGPT, they are even more insidious than quotations from ‘hallucinated’ cases because they are attributed, falsely, to actual reported (if miscited) cases, which renders them more difficult and burdensome to detect." . . .
At the July 11 hearing on the OSC, Schelly and Badawi appeared in person as the court had directed. The court began the hearing by explaining the reason for the OSC: “The brief contained inaccurate citations, misrepresentations of California law, and remarkably eight different purported quotations from cases that are as far as the court can determine, entirely fabricated, invented, they don’t exist. [¶] They don’t appear in any of the cited cases. They don’t appear in any reported California case authority.”
Speaking on LLG’s behalf, Schelly apologized to the court and stated, “we’re all absolutely embarrassed, dismayed, upset that something like this has occurred involving our firm.” The court responded, “unfortunately, Mr. Schelly, the damage is done, but in the sense that both the court and your opponent had been put [through] the burden of reading and responding to a brief that turned out to be dishonest and—literally, almost literally, at every page. [¶] This is the worst example of misconduct by a lawyer that I think I’ve ever seen since I’ve been on the bench.”"
Yeah. Might have wanted to just take your lumps and go home on that one.
