Lawyers Getting Really High On AI Hallucinations

0:11Welcome to another edition of Thinking Like a Lawyer. I'm Joe Patrice from Above the Law. I'm joined by some above the law colleagues, specifically Catherine Rubino. Hey. And Chris Williams. Yep. And we do what we do every week, which is discuss some of the big stories from the week that was in legal, in this case, kind of two weeks worth of material because we weren't able to record last week because of a variety of chaos, largely. Oh, I got cut off by the small talk sign, But largely owing to me being at the American Association of Law Libraries conference, have a partying with the law librarians, you know, very fun group, which sounds like I'm being sarcastic, but it's not true.

0:57They actually are an uncommonly fun group. So doing that. Was it like some really spirited citation? What does fun mean? I mean, they're party people, you know. So, yeah. Party people. Well, I was kind of low-key impressed, Joe, by your title of your A-A-L-L write-up. The revolution will be card catalogued. Nice. Yeah. Well, it is interesting because I think a lot of people in the legal profession overlook what the law librarians have accomplished, which they shouldn't because this is a profession that in a lot of ways, as things got digitized, you would almost have thought that law librarians would have gone away.

1:38But instead, they just pivoted pretty instantly to being the premier knowledge management people within organizations. Yeah, I mean, it is actually a really, really smart pivot. And what I also think is really interesting is that it wasn't sort of one person, like, you know, somebody individually at their firm or job somehow realizing that, hey, you know, this technology writing's on the wall. Let me change how I'm relevant to my firm in the following way. Sure, that happens. But when you see an entire profession pivot quite smartly, I can't think the last time I've seen something like that. And so therefore, it has a lot of tech overtones, and AI is definitely involved.

2:24And obviously, there are AI implications to research, which are positives for librarians. But one of the best panels I attended there dealt with, at least tangentially, the AI, the power of AI to supercharge disinformation campaigns, which they were very concerned about and view themselves a little bit. in particular the public side law librarians because you mentioned law firms and obviously those exist and law school law librarians but there are also public law libraries there are government law libraries there is and fighting disinformation is something that is a in particular on the public side they're deeply concerned about and so ai was you know it was a holding out promise and danger both well getting to the smaller top part half of small talk chris do i spy a new hair do you do and besides joe no one else will give in the nature of this podcast but i do appreciate the shout out yeah yeah um uh you have locks up for the one of the few times that i feel like they're actually done i went to a funeral over the weekend and i wanted to be presentable so that was the that was the main reason but i've had less of a reason to be pretty so it was it was a it needed to be done either way i am sorry for your loss appreciate it on a lighter note i've been delving into fragrances recently and i found out that i really like uh ouds uh okay yeah they're more aren't they a villain on doctor who god you know what sucks is that i was about to say something similar i don't you i don't think they were villain they were they were like they were just another they're like monsters who are yeah anyway they turned out to not be villains but yes i also know the oud that he's referring to in terms of fragrance well i will say since i'm not familiar with Dr.

4:10Who as much. There may be some scent overlap, but I assume not. But yeah, I'm like on my third Oud Fragrance Deep. I'm like, these are great. I'm finding out about this in summer, which is not the right season for it. So once winter comes, I'm going to be the best melon person you know who has a long degree around you. Yeah, yeah. You're about to be ready. I know we're kind of in the exact middle of summer, the kind of end of July, beginning of August, but it doesn't feel that way. I don't know. Maybe time is just, you know, again, to bring up Doctor Who, timey, whiny on me here. But I don't know.

4:45This barely even feels like summer. I've had so much rain and terrible weather. I don't know. I just feel like I have had very little just pure summertime vibes. Yeah. Cool. Let's move on to our series of main topics. Well, you were talking about AI disinformation a second ago. Sorry to kind of pivot a little bit on you there. But I just felt like it was too good. Segway? Yes, a segue. There you go. But yeah, related to disinformation, obviously, I mean, disinformation has the question of sort of see, enter. Are we doing the disinformation on purpose or is it an accident? But there's - Where are we going here?

5:33Hallucinations. AI hallucinations. Yeah, yeah, yeah, all right. Okay. as a segue it was kind of like the other kind of segue it came in with a lot of fanfare and then it kind of fell over um but all right so that was mean yeah i i i hold no loyalty to the manufacturer of segues i don't i don't okay i don't need to be nice to them let's roll past it Oh, yeah. Well, so yeah, so we had a week. I did not intend to write six stories or whatever it was about AI hallucinations last week, but that's certainly what happened. And the interesting part about that, if I could just jump in real there, sometimes a story blows up throughout the course of a week and you build on in and there's an update and this new development.

6:19And there's little of that in all of your stories about AI hallucinations. These are just separate stories for the most part. Yeah, the first one of the week was an update to one the previous week, but otherwise they were all original. And that actually gets to where I kind of wanted to go with this, which is that the – and I guess another one was an update from a couple months ago. But we have had ever since kind of the rise of AI in public prominence. We had a case in New York where some lawyers got in trouble because they asked ChatGPT for help with legal research, and it amazingly found exactly the case they needed, and it said every exact thing they prompted it to – that prompted that they wanted because it invented it.

7:05That case happened a couple years ago. Everyone learned that this was a problem, and therefore no lawyer ever did it again. Ha ha. But yeah, so as it's been happening, we're now almost at 200 instances of it that I'm aware of in the U.S. Did you get that number from ChatGP2? No, there is actually a database. Is it a counter somewhere? Yeah, there's a database that's collecting all of these. But what I found interesting about what happened last week was while these have been trickling out over the course of the last couple years, we had a week where it was just we really went we went all out and we had some new developments that we hadn't seen before the first one i wrote about was an update to this lawyer who defended himself having been caught in some mistakes with a response to the order to show cause that was shall we say a little more pretentious than it probably should have been uh it he said stuff about the scribes of Arush and Nabal and his belief that practicing law is like leaving an indelible mark upon clay.

8:18A bunch of the stuff like that that undermined the sincerity, I feel, yeah. He wrote like he liked the sound of his voice a little too much. Yeah, well, and there's a not insubstantial number of people who think that he wrote kind of like he asked ChatGPT to write something that sounded pretty. Anyway, however it ended up being that pretentious, I did worry. I actually thought his apology came across relatively genuine, but I thought that the flowery prose, shall we say, made it seem a little less than sincere and that that could hurt him. It hurt him. The judge responded by trolling him, by putting in references to Macbeth and stuff like that and as she did saying you know to borrow from the way he writes uh so it wasn't wasn't great for him i mean not terrible though she well she also found that one of the one of the actual substantive law quotes he put in his apology also was misquoted which you know first rule maybe lay off on the scribes of a russian a ball and and and you know actually check your work But yeah, so that was the first one that came down.

9:31That wasn't particularly new. What was new last week? Let us count the ways. We had a federal judge issue an opinion and then withdraw it. It was withdrawn after counsel pointed out that many of the citations in it they couldn't find. No one used the word AI, but I think we all know where that leads. And that's a firebreak, right? Judges have usually been the barrier to it. some hapless lawyer makes the mistake and it gets caught. Now, a few weeks ago, we had a judge sign off on an order that was based on fake cases without really checking. Now we have a judge issue an opinion filled with fake quotes.

10:13Yeah. Not great. For my two cents, I thought one of the other sort of interesting develops in our week in AI was where the who gets blamed for it happening. Obviously, it's a little different for a judge that's not going to say, well, my clerk, they haven't thrown anybody under the bus. Well, I have received an unconfirmed report that I'm chasing down, but I've received an unconfirmed report that I should be watching that judge's chambers for announcements of particular career clerks leaving. Moving on. So I will be watching that. Yeah, for sure. But, you know, in one of the other cases you wrote about, I thought it was interesting that the judge who was sort of metting out responsibility kind of said it ends at the top right here.

11:05So, yeah, so I'll take a detour through another one first, which we also heard the Chicago Housing Authority, which is pushing back against a$24 million verdict because they had lead paint and knew about it in some of these houses, some of these facilities since the 90s and didn't do anything about it. That tends to get you in trouble, and it did. They got in their attempt to push back on this verdict. It was found that there were some fake citations or fake quotes anyway in their response. They have already fired a partner over it. That partner had written an article about AI ethics problematically, never really talking about the hallucination aspects of it.

11:50That said, that story is not over yet. There's more that I just saw a new sanctions motion posted, and we'll see what's said in that as far as the investigation into that. So blame going to a partner there, but not the lead partner. The lead partner blamed someone else on the team. The flip side of this goes to what happened in Alabama. So a few weeks ago, or a couple months ago, actually, I guess, Butler Snow, who represents the Department of Corrections down there, To the extent that one of its partners is technically the deputy – has the designation Deputy Attorney General of the state for the sole purpose of litigating these cases.

12:33They were litigating one of these matters. There were fake things found in there. They pushed back on it. The judge – this was a real development. So we had the real development of a federal judge issuing something bad. Now, we have a real development of while a lot of these cases have been met with some slap on the wrist sanctions, here we have a judge who did not do that. First things first, though, kind of to what you were alluding to, Catherine, they absolved the associates of any blame in the case, noting that they weren't really the ones responsible for the problem. in a profession where a lot of the workflow begins at that level and gets uh gets percolated up and mistakes can be percolated that way and blame therefore goes downhill towards them rolls downhill one they weren't blamed partially a partially i think because uh that they were not the ones ultimately in a position responsibility but also because they weren't the ones responsible and this i think was the interesting development and one that i think resonates across these problems.

13:34The problems coming from inside the partner office, that's where these mistakes tend to happen. And I think it speaks to the way in which these AI products are being treated by senior folks as though they are a replacement for young humans. It was a partner who inserted the fake stuff. It was a partner partners who then signed it after inserting the fake stuff. It was them looking for the shortcut that caused this. And the judge did not have much sympathy for this, going so far as to kick all of them off the case, including the so-called deputy attorney general, who the state said they wanted to keep on the case, and the judge said, not on my watch.

14:18Nope, hard pass. This is too bad. Well, and it didn't help that, aside from the AI stuff, It didn't help that their defense as a firm was – or his defense in particular as the engagement person with the firm who signs things was the law is so settled here. I don't really ever look at it. Judge did not find that to be particularly – I don't really pay attention to the cases I cite is shockingly non-persvasive. Yeah, yeah. One way to put about that that I find interesting, totally not related to anything here substantially, but it reminds me one of the things that there were the cases of people using diversity as pertains to being a factor in what law review articles were accepted.

15:06it, one of the things they said was teachers tend to use cite to the same cases. So if you're citing to different cases, that's a point in your favor. So just to hear a partner say, well, the law doesn't really change that much. It's just interesting to hear how uniform the citation is at that level. Well, and that's actually a good lead into what I was going to say. Another aspect, of course, is that this speaks to the way in which we kind of have a broken body of law with regard to prisoners. The reason why there's not a lot of variation is we have four or five cases that decide, well, because the totality of cases pretty much say, we don't care about our inmates.

15:51So in this case, where somebody got stabbed 20 times and the prison did nothing, and I don't mean they got stabbed in an incident where someone stabbed them 20 times, They got stabbed 20 different times, and the prison didn't do anything about it. The body of law is so universally screw our prisoners that they don't even have to think. They grab like four of them. That's fine. They all say the same thing. So it's actually a real testament to the brokenness of that system that he thought he didn't need to get anything else. Although also, not for nothing, given how broken it is, I don't quite understand why the partner in question tried to find a new case through chat GPT because they were going to get away with it anyway.

16:31But whatever. Yeah, I just thought it was all together an interesting week in AI hallucination. We had like I ended up writing five or six stories about it. There were a bunch of things coming from a bunch of different vectors all at the same time. It seems like the problem is accelerating.

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18:05Okay, what do we want to talk about now? Let's talk about some big law delays going on. we wrote a story, broke the news last week that at A &O Sherman, most of the summer associate, or the, sorry, not the summer associate, it's the incoming associates, the class of 2025 that they are hiring for full-time associate gigs received notice that their start date will be delayed. It is pushed all the way back to January. Now, most start dates are sometime in the fall. There were two start dates. I think they were initially offered to folks, and now they won't be starting until the new year. So, you know, a couple of questions.

18:49This is obviously a tactic that we have seen in big law before, but usually when there have been other signs of bad things going on, other austerity measures going on, some maybe layoffs in the industry, some noteworthy slowdowns. And we haven't heard a ton of that coming out of A &O quite yet. But is this a bellwether? What are we going to hear in the future? It's certainly noteworthy and interesting in that respect. Several years ago, there was a report, I believe it was from ALM Intelligence, I can't remember. But these big mergers that everyone does, they think it's going to cause unprecedented and unrestrained growth.

19:31And it tends to end up bouncing out where they're back where they started. Now, I don't know, so that's the long term path here, but it doesn't bode particularly well for them that, you know, just early stages of a merger there. Yeah, yeah, it was finalized last year. So this would have been the people starting obviously this last year that started under the new banner. But this would have been the first sort of folks that were summer associates under the new firm and then the first full class post the merger. But it is interesting, and from what we have heard from insiders, we are talking the majority of the summer associate class.

20:15Exact figures I have not been able to confirm, but it is most of them. And I also heard that they were told sort of not immediately before they started. Obviously, they weren't even supposed to start yet. But at a time in the summer where several people had already started, you know, leases, moved, moved because they were starting. They were studying for the bar and moving up and, you know, kind of doing all this stuff and starting their lives and had already, you know, committed to leases, assuming they were going to get a big law paycheck pretty darn soon. and that is not happening. The firm is offering a salary advance repayable within 10 months of starting.

21:01But that is very different than some of the other times we've seen other firms delay start dates where they give folks a stipend that's not repayable, doesn't have to be repaid back. So that is also a difference and very noteworthy, especially if you're in the midst of it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so I think that there's only one person who can help out these people, you know, and, you know, I think we all need to call upon him to help these poor A &O folks who are hoping to get their job started. I think that it's time for Donald Trump to call in some of those pro bono favors that he secured from A &O.

21:42I only want first year associates on this, Matt. Yeah. How much did A &O go in for? I think it was$125 million. All right, well, here we go. Let's start making some requests, Donnie. It's certainly interesting. Well, you know, basically the firm's saying they don't have enough work to go around. I mean, come on. They have$125 million in free work they're supposed to be giving. Yeah, I think that is definitely the signal that people are taking away from this fact, is that they don't have the work to go around. We don't have any official statement from the firm on it, but that is certainly the perception to somebody from looking in from the outside.

22:25As far as the person to call in, Joe, your answer made a lot more sense. But on the back of my mind, I was thinking, please say Hulk Hogan. Oh, I was thinking Ghostbusters. Who are you going to call? I don't know. That's what I thought he was going. I was like, A &O, is there a joke there that I'm missing? No. The ghost of Sterling? Like, is that why? Because he got cut out of the name during the merger? Oh, yeah. No, I'm only half kidding, though, because I do think – You're all kidding, but yes. Because it is a statement about that, right? Like about how unseriously the firms actually take these commitments with Trump for whether that comes back to bite them or not.

23:03But they got all of the negative baggage of making these commitments to him that exist, and they're not going to even attempt to honor them. We also had a story this week that reveals that apparently according to internal messages in these firms, they all just are really like, yeah, we're just never going to do anything about this. We assume he's not going to care. But it is a testament to how little they care about it that they don't – they can't even bring people on to do$125 million worth of work that they've already committed to do. Well, I mean it was not committed to be done within one year, but yes, I certainly take your point.

23:39Sure. but they aren't serious about doing this work. Yes, I take your point. Yeah, alright. Well, you see now when you say you take it like, when you take it and where are you telling me to shove it? Like, that's what I'm not quite getting. Right in the ear. I don't know. Alright, the final issue that played out over the course of the last week and a half was the Alina Hava issue in New Jersey. This was a confusing one because it involves a lot of overlapping statutes and a not confusing one because the administration just decided to ignore all the statutes. But for those who weren't following along, Alina is a parking garage lawyer who has somehow worked her way into the upper echelons of the Trump inner circle.

24:28He made her the, well, he didn't make her. That's a key part of this. The attorney general, Pam Bondi, appointed her as an interim US attorney. that means she got to do that job for 120 days. Starts the clock and then a panel of district judges have to either approve or not. Sort of. So that starts a 120-day clock for her to serve in that interim role, which is different than an acting role that comes up later. She serves in that interim role. In the normal course of business, that person is usually nominated to get that job as a full-time and they get confirmed by the Senate before that 120 days is out, and that ends it.

25:12This administration forgot to nominate her. Oh, they didn't forget. Well, no. They decided not to. Well, they could have just never done it. They did do it, but so late in the process that there was no hope of her getting confirmed in time. Then the Senate also said they didn't want to do that. This prompted the scenario where they leaned on, as Catherine already highlighted, there's a backdoor that if no one gets that job by 120 days, the district court judges there get to decide who gets that job. The administration leaned on them, please pick her. they chose not to and chose instead between some candidates they chose a career prosecutor who happened to be the first assistant there.

26:03Yeah we now know that any governing body acting well within their rights is them playing politics when it's not doing what Trump wanted them to do. Well and that is kind of the thing so the response immediately after they made that choice is they were blasted by Bondi and everyone else in the administration for being activists. politics playing judges, then we won't stand for it. We fired the first assistant. Now, here's the thing. The first assistant getting fired had no impact on this decision because the decision wasn't that they elevated the first assistant. The first assistant was picked at random, well, not at random, but picked among candidates and just happened to be the first assistant.

26:46So firing them had no impact at all on whether or not they get the job at the end of the week. So they screwed that part up. They also screwed up the part where they decided to blame the judges for the fact that they failed to get a nomination through the Senate, a body that, as a reminder, they control. So at this point, they fired the first assistant who is not working for the rest of the week before they legally become the U.S. attorney. The administration says we're going to make Habba the U.S. attorney again, but the rule doesn't allow them to make her the interim again. And then you can, the president can make them an acting U.S.

27:27attorney, but there's a rule that says you can't do that if there is a pending nomination. So they argued that, well, fine, we withdraw her permanent nomination and make her kind of this permanent lawless acting position. But that doesn't work because the statute doesn't actually say you can't be in that role if you have a nomination pending. It says you can't be in that role if you have been nominated, which means that the fact that she had been nominated within the last 365 days should be the reason she can't get that job. But instead what they did is they ignored that, made her her own assistant fulfilling the role of the person who they just fired, and then are now saying under that process she's going to elevate to be the acting attorney general when her own job disappears because she is her own deputy.

28:20Again, not legal under the statute. It's so much bending. I feel like it's like legal yoga, which is so much contorting. The problem here for me is that this isn't even hard. Like, they just needed to nominate her early and then tell the Senate to go forward with it. That would have been the whole thing. There is one aside. Speaking of interesting stories, the one you penned, the title was Alina Haber to let the screen door hit her on the way out. of yours of course before we find out the details i read the uh excerpt for it and i was like damn that's a bold move joe i didn't realize you were making the bruce springsteen reference oh yeah it was like a honey tramps like alina baby weren't born to run and i was like wait there's no way so i looked it up and i was like it's a bruce springsteen song well i mean we're talking about new jersey where else are we gonna go with our references here totally fair yeah totally fair But if you just happen to not know that specific Bruce Springsteen's song from 50 years ago, it's like, why is he calling her a tramp?

29:22Yes, why indeed. But yeah, no. So even though it seemed like she was done, she has been sprung from her cage on Highway 9 and is back in office. Boo. Boo. All right. See, I fully expected you to hit the applaud button on the sound machine. Oh, yeah, I should. But anyway, so, well, all right. Well, that's I think that brings us to a natural stopping point. Thanks, everybody, for listening. You should subscribe to the show if you haven't already. So you get new episodes. You should be giving it likes and reviews and all that sort of stuff to help people find it. You should also check out Catherine's show, The Jabot.

30:05You can check out the Legal Tech Week Journalist Roundtable that I'm a guest on. You should be listening to other shows on the Legal Talk Network. you should read Above the Law so you read these and other stories before we talk about them here be sure to follow on social media at AboveLaw.com at Blue Sky I'm Joe Patrice she's Catherine one Chris is Rights for Rent and yeah engage with us there that's that's the easiest place and with all that we're done bye all peace

30:47Thank you.