The Hallucinations Are Winning

0:11Welcome to another edition of Thinking Like a Lawyer. I'm Joe Patrice from Above the Law. I'm joined by Catherine Rubino. Hey. And Chris Williams. What's up? And we are all doing what we do every week, which is give you a rundown of some of the big legal stories from the week that was over here at Above the Law. Obviously, well, this kind of... Oh, there we go. Yeah, that's our sign that we're going to have some small talk, which is we didn't have nearly as many stories this week because, of course, we had a holiday-shortened weekend. Which allowed us to... Which is technically a three-day weekend, but I think a lot of us took it as a four-day weekend.

0:50What was it? No. It was a three-day weekend. We got off Friday, but I think that... Oh, that people did take it as a four-day weekend. People checked out Thursday. Right, right, right. At least mentally, if not physically. I see, I see, I see. Yeah, so... Joe didn't notice because he is still so engrossed in the legal side of AI that every day he's just logged in doing the effort. Well, I mean, you know, it was the sort of week where people did their best to dump things, dump bad news so that people wouldn't pay attention to it over the holiday weekend. So, you know, somebody had to be locked in to make sure that, you know, the powerful don't get away with bad things.

1:31You know, I guess I just care about buying. Like the decision was made. They got away with it. But it was a holiday weekend. I did a fair amount of BBQing, but that I mean grilling, not like the real slow process barbecue, but put things on the grill and it was quite tasty. What's your favorite barbecue grill sort of treat? I will open this up to both of you. Oh, I have the objective correct answer. It's burnt ends. Yeah, I agree. Well, yes. Yes. I think that's right. Those are delicious. But I was more thinking like on a typical like grilling, not necessarily something that you have to dedicate like chunks of your life to doing, like something that you could do like in a quicker form that's like, ooh, this would be a fun treat right now as opposed to something you need to sort of plot and plan, which no disrespect to burnt ends.

2:28It's just a commitment. So just a quick grilling situation. Like hot dogs or not, right? Right, right. On the quick grilling situation, I think I will go unconventional. I think nothing really beats a breakfast on there. Ooh. So, yeah. You got flat top action going on? Yeah, get like a griddle insert and get some, yeah. Yeah, I like that for you. What about you, Chris? I mean, I know burnt ends still have a place of love in your heart, but they're not the only option. If I understand what you're saying, one, I don't know why Joe answered breakfast, but two, it would be grilled fruit. Ooh, okay.

3:04So like some grilled pineapple, grilled watermelon, It's a nice little salt on either. It helps bring out the sweetness. Or tahini. That's really tasty on it. That also works. Not my cultural background, but I respect it. Yeah, I tried to get into tahini. It's not the... I guess I kind of like mango, but it's not that it's bad. It's just not the thing I reach for. It's in my kitchen. I see the jar of it. I give it a head nod when I walk past. And that's about the end of it. Maybe next time. end of it one thing i will say uh hot dogs are mentioned as a easy uh as a easy grill go-to um we have moved past the hot dog meta as being like the cheap easy meat to prepare for a lot of people pork shoulder get on pork shoulder it is very inexpensive per pound and it feeds a lot of people for like 30 bucks you can do like 15 or so pounds of meat season it cook it on low cook it low and slow and it's delicious you can do pulled pork with it you can slice it up if you want to very versatile uh so just for any of the uh if you're a pit master listening you already know about the joys of pork shoulder but if you're if you're a novice who makes like eggnog in a pressure cooker or something yeah sous vide but yeah the way it goes i mean we i already kind of mentioned it but nothing is quite as delightful as a hot dog on the grill to me like when they get like all like a little bit burnt you know charcoal is tasty if cancerous uh you know like a little little char on it maybe a toasted bun and i think that like the world is your oyster when it comes to toppings i made some chili this weekend and we did chili cheese dogs which just felt elite i can't even lie yeah no i'll be honest i can't i can't hear about chili cheese dogs and not think about sonic the hedgehog because of sonic the location no sonic the hedgehog like the sega character no i mean his favorite food is chili chili cheese dogs oh well they also sell them at sonic the the fast food locale i've probably i'm not sure which came first but yeah for for there's some reason that chili cheese dogs are canonically sonic the hedgehog's favorite food.

5:18Interesting. Yes. I guess I checked out of the Sega verse before that became relevant. Maybe that's why he's running. So. He's got to go to the potty. Got to go fast. Yeah. Oh, I love that we made poop jokes. Thanks for extending the joke all the way there. You're welcome. I was just prepared to, I assumed our audience who is, yeah, our audience who is very sophisticated, I thought understood it already, but okay. Well, mercifully, we come to the end of that. Let's delve into the stories of the week. The biggest story of the week for us was about a firm that we don't talk about a lot, Morris Manning, which is kind of a – I mean, it's not totally fair to say regional, but a firm that has real southeast Maine presence, has some other offices.

6:13But Morris Manning, AMLA 200, has lost about a third of its attorneys over the last little run to a bunch of other for similarly for slightly larger situated firms. Had another big, big blow from Seiforth Shaw. Seiforth got in there and grabbed a bunch of people. And now apparently Morris Manning is having merger talks. I mean, not super surprising. One of the primary assets that a law firm has is its personnel, which is inherently mobile. You could leave them at any time. And partners leaving certainly can cause almost like a run. Like, you know, you do like a run on a bank and if law firms don't know how to manage that and have real plans in place in order to reassure the partners that are left, you know, it's either leads to more partners leaving or the sort of merger talk, which I guess is part of the plan.

7:20So my takeaway on it was this does kind of underscore that the run on mid-sized markets is on, I think. We've traditionally had the bigger firms headquartered in bigger cities, even if they're taking on work in other places. They like home base in these bigger markets, leaving some mid-sized markets to play amongst themselves. that seems to be disappearing, whether it's other small mid-sized firms trying to aggressively grow into new markets, which we've seen quite a bit of as some of the big players have been taking over these traditional firms in markets across the country, or if it's a major firm moving into a city that is up and coming like an Atlanta of where we're talking about here.

8:12folks are you know that there's that area that space is no longer a safe space for you to cultivate a big but not huge practice uh and the consolidation is continuing now i don't know as though that's i've never really thought that that's necessarily the smartest move uh i think there's there's some good studies uh one that uh who did it uh i think alms intelligence group did it several years ago, and I wrote about it at the time, that just that went looked back at all the mergers in law firms and whether or not these have ever actually paid off. And in a lot of ways, it's chasing growth that never ends up materializing.

8:56You know, it, you get bigger, but then you lose a bunch of people because of redundancy, then the culture changes and a bunch of people leave and you're left back basically where you started. If that's the case, now, Obviously, chasing new markets and new practice areas makes that a little bit different. You aren't going to have redundancies if you're moving into these new offices. But is it something that you can sustain in these new places? Do you, by bringing in a new brand name, lose some of the institutional cachet that the old place had? Are you going to have billing issues? I mean, you've got now, especially if you're a firm that plays in a major market as well as in one of these smaller markets, what are you billing people out at?

9:45Are you sending – is it kind of a colonialist situation where you're sending work back to the metropole? If you're doing that, then clients who are used to paying at a certain mid-firm and regional price point are now being forced to pay at a higher price point. Like, do they leave over that? Like that there's a lot of issues with the merger world that I really worry aren't necessarily the best. I mean, I think it's interesting that you are very cautious at the very minimum about mergers because we're seeing more of them this year. We wrote something about Fairfax Associates did a report, and in the first six months of 2025, merger activity is up 21 % over the same time in 2024.

10:34And not just sort of regional markets. There's also a lot of bigger name mergers that are happening. In the first half of 2025, Herbert Smith completed its merger with Kramer 11. And, you know, it seems as if big law is still very much in consolidation mode. Yeah, the McDermott and Schulte thing is moving forward. Yeah, that obviously has not been completed, so it counts in the second half accounting for that particular report. I view this as more of a like and like merger, which is the one where it probably will work out, although they're going to have some redundancy issues. I feel that the expansion into new markets one, though, who is it?

11:20I think it's Slaughter and May, of all the Magic Circle firms, the one who doesn't have aggressive presences outside of the UK. And a lot of that, I gather, is that they have embraced the idea that the smart play is to have strategic partnerships and referral networks with local firms in other places rather than to try and take it on themselves. I've always thought that they might be on to something, that when you move into a place, I mean, that is the big splash, but you are also taking on some costs, and that can lead to problems. For sure. But I also think that part of this sort of urge to merge is also motivated by these bigger and bigger partner paydays that the lateral market for partners is very different than it was 5, 10, 20 years ago, lots of firms that would never consider lateral partners all of a sudden are making big hires and having to pony up big paydays in order to lure those folks there.

12:24And if they aren't ready to do that in the lateral market, what they're seeing is their homegrown talent is finding someone who will pay them upwards of$20 million in order to take that book of business with them. And given that reality, making these sorts of mergers to sort of increase your leverage, increase your ability to make these big paydays to lure that talent either back to keep, you know, your homegrown talent or to encourage more folks to join your practice. It's kind of cyclical. It's kind of a chicken or the egg situation when you're trying to figure out what is causing this difference in how big law is operating.

13:05Yeah. But they're in conversations with AMLA 100 firm, apparently, and we'll see what comes of that. Yeah, I mean, it may not be a merger in the sense that, you know, I don't think that their name is getting added to the end of any letterhead, and it may even be the situation where just there's a mass set of lateral offers being made to their attorneys, and then that firm will slowly dissolve. That's also, I think, something that people were hypothesizing as well. Yeah, I think that they claim to be in advanced discussions for the mergers. So my guess is that it will probably be that these will become additional offices for some more national firm.

13:50Yeah, one insider said, though, that they thought it was more going to be the higher-away model. So we'll see. Yeah. Every legal professional wants to put their clients first, but billing, payments, and case management get in the way. 8AM is the professional business platform that helps law firms get paid faster, manage cases more easily, and grow with confidence. Trusted by over 260 ,000 legal professionals, 8AM integrated solutions like 8AM Law Pay and 8AM My Case help simplify the business of running your firm so you can actually put your clients first, first. Visit 8am.com slash legal talk to learn more.

14:42That's my impression of the hold music your callers hear right before they hang up. Smith AI pairs AI with real live agents to answer calls, qualify leads, book consultations, and even send retainers 24-7. Better intake, fewer missed opportunities. No more hold music solos. Try it free at smith.ai. Mention above the law or use code NOHOLD at sign up to claim 20 % off your first two months of service. The next is also a Georgia connection. I didn't really realize this is Georgia day maybe because the other story is we've been talking a bit, dating back to the, you know, in legal tech circles, everyone just knows the Avianca thing, but that's the original case in New York where some lawyers used ChatGPT to find some citations for their brief.

15:38The brief was very on point. It produced cases that were basically exactly what they wanted, and that's because they were fake. That looks good. Too good. Well, right. Well, and that's the thing with these cases. That's the big thing with AI as a law tool. Well, you know, this is just kind of an aside before getting the real story, but it's a real ass kisser, AI is. I mean, it doesn't want to tell you you're bad at things. And so if you ask it a question, like I need a case that gives me this outcome, it will find that case even if it has to make it up because it wants you to be happy. And that was kind of the problem in that case.

16:25In that case, of course, got worse and worse because as the deception starts getting found out, they, not knowing it, it better ask ChatGPT, seriously, where is this case? And ChatGPT's like, here, and then wrote the case for them because it didn't want to admit that it didn't exist. So they got in trouble. They got fined five grand for it. It seemed very small at the time, but also it was very early. People were just learning. And the public embarrassment lives on. Public embarrassment lives on. One might have thought this was the end of it. It has not been the end of it. Nope. We have had constant AI hallucinated screw-ups at the law firm level, but at least they've all been at the law firm level.

17:10Somebody is – somebody on the other side catches it. Or litigants level. It might also – Fair. Let's put aside contracts. I mean the harms with contracts are different because the other side signs it, so then it becomes – I meant that the DOJ, you wrote a thing that it may not be law firms. That was also a litigation. Right. That's what I – But yes. So yeah. But they've all been caught. The other law firm on the other side of the case is catching them. When they do their research, judges are preemptively finding these and calling out, hey, I tried to find this and it doesn't exist. That's been the case so far, which has allowed a lot of this AI hallucination stuff to be something that is kind of enjoyable eye rolling more or less on our side.

18:01But I have been beating a note of caution that someday this is going to spill over and it's going to spill over in a case probably where there are power dynamic issues between the parties where one side may not have a lawyer who is going through and capable of site checking. And it's going to involve a judge who doesn't care or it's a very seemingly easy case so they aren't really taking the time and energy to follow along closely. And then it's going to break contain and it's going to break contain in a way that's going to hurt people. And we might not even know it's hurting them because they're not going to be the sort of folks who are able to publicize that they got their rights taken away in some landlord tenant case because of some made up Mario versus Sonic case or something along those lines to bring us back to that.

18:51In Georgia, we broke the threshold. Now, it's not it got caught at the appellate level, but we broke we broke new ground. And in this instance, it was a divorce, a key one of those sorts of cases where maybe not both sides have the same resources to fight it. A husband and his attorney filed their motion and included a proposed order. For those of you who aren't litigators on the transactional side, a lot of times what will happen is if you file a motion, especially if you're filing a motion, you don't think the other side is particularly sophisticated. But you file the motion and include as an addendum, here's what we think your order should look like, judge.

19:38And judges are in those sorts of cases are usually very happy to just handwrite their signature on it and a date and just say, yeah, the one you filed sounds good to me. And then it becomes the order. In this instance, we had that. It was a order prepared by the husband. It was an order prepared by the husband on the strength of the brief. The brief included fake cases. These fake cases then are called out eventually by the other attorney, the attorney for the wife. This gets to the appellate level. At the appellate level, the husband files a new brief. It includes 11 more new fake cases. Okay.

20:25I don't know that there's been any discipline at this point yet. But doubling down on the fake cases when you've already been people like, hey, there's a problem. You have fake cases. And instead of, you know, making sure that you're dotting your T's and crossing your eyes on your appellate brief, you respond with more hallucinated cases. That's real bad. The appellate panel names the husband's attorney full name six times in their order, which certainly sounds like they're signaling to somebody that that needs to happen. It was interesting that they held to formality by just referring to the district court rather than also writing down several times the judge's name, which seems like that probably is more who needs it.

21:18But at least the judge didn't double down. The judge made the initial mistake but did not, you know, in the appellate brief or in subsequent justifications be like, here's more fake shit. Yeah. Is there really no way for someone to include in the prompt limit the responses given to actual cases? To real things. Yeah. Well, this goes to the issue with using what we call consumer-facing AI versus some of this legal-specific AI. You know, there's a lot of money being spent at the Thomson Reuters and Lexus level to make sure that the AI that they are including in their products to lawyers are built with the sorts of guardrails that lawyers need such that the AI itself understands not to give you stuff that isn't real.

22:08That also is supercharged, of course, because they're trained on the back files of Thomson Reuters and Lexus, which are extensive. But yeah, but that's the issue. And that all then opens up the new the corollary access to justice issue, which is as these AIs get better, because TR, Lexus, those sorts of providers are putting tons and tons of money into them, they are going to be very, very expensive. And we start entering at that point an arms race with the use of AI itself because there had been – there is some mood among the legal tech world that, hey, AI could provide gains in the access to justice world.

22:56You know, pro se litigants are able to utilize it to find things, whatever. But with the risk of hallucinations, so on, as it become as the only versions of it that work are super expensive, then you're right back where you started, if not worse off. And that's the other concern. So yeah, but the check on it has always been that at least the judges, if not the adversarial system itself, would be able to stop it. And it did here in that the wife's lawyer did catch it and the appeals court did stop it. But this is a new line. We crossed another mile marker here now that we have a judge who actually has rubber stamped.

23:42I mean, I think we crossed two, the doubling down in the appellate brief in the first instance and then also. No, no, no. Remember, the original instance of this involves somebody doubling down because they were too stupid to stop themselves. So I think we're definitely – that's not new ground. But yeah, a judge not catching this is a problem. Yeah, I think we're going to find more and more clerks have the assignment. print me out yes with paper copies of every case cited and when they can't find it then you know i that was something you know people used to do in the 90s 2000s was you know you had these partners or judges who didn't want to deal with electronic anything like binders and we're going to come back to this because it's the only sort of sharp foolproof way but but but this is my issue right like that's that's the big law world like there's a lot at stake or whatever and while While there's also a lot at stake in a random divorce in Georgia, it is also the sort of case that the judge is going to say, I'm not going to dick around with having somebody print up a bunch of cases.

24:48And that's the concern. Right, but I'm sure, you know, we talked about sort of technology solutions. I'm sure it's a lower price point to create some product that grabs from reputable locations, Lexis, Westlaw, all that kind of places to append them to something, right? So that judges can use these sorts of technologies in order to hit a button to make sure all the cases exist. And here they are. And I think that's what you're going to find. And I think that there's probably a market for it and for appellate litigators or just sort of trial litigators as well to be like, let's just triple check.

25:21Is there a button I can hit on some program that I already own that, you know, some upgrade? I mean, legal research is going to get more expensive. And obviously judges usually are in a position to get better public sector deals. But other attorneys are that this is an industry that's getting more expensive. Sure, but what I'm saying is that is less of an AI investment, right, to be able to hit a bet and say where are the cases, where are they located, is a much more discreet. I would say no. I would say that all of the major providers in the legal research area, AI is integrated directly into what they're doing research-wise because it's too big of an investment not to make that.

26:05Not to show age, I would compare it to the move from Boolean searches to natural language where you're just like, I just wanted to use my old Boolean search, but now it's all set up. There was a toggle for a very long time. Yeah, yeah, right. Well, so now a lot of them are putting the AI in there because – and it makes some sense. If you've spent$600 million on an AI company, you don't want it to be this little one-off on the side. You want it to be the lens through which everything works, and that means you've got to pay off that$600 million and the additional investment, and that means you start charging people more.

26:42And that's also an issue. You know, we just saw the basically the third big competitor to Thomson Reuters and and Lexus Vlex just got bought for a billion dollars. And so, yeah, like the consolidation is real and it's expensive. So my contribution is I think that we need to stop calling it AI hallucinations. I think I feel like I've said this earlier. Well, not not in the podcast, just like on different different occasions, because like if I was writing a brief, and I did this and I wanted to get away with it. AI hallucination is one step up from citation oopsie as far as a way of phrasing what you did.

27:24Like, why doesn't this consider it to be fraud or lying? Because like at the end of the day, the author of the legal document is not the AI program. It is the lawyer. Like the lawyer put in inaccurate information and pass it off as being their work. Like there needs to be some way – we need to talk about this in terms of fraud or some other way that draws attention to the actual agent, which is the attorney, and not the program that was used in the writing of the thing. Well, that's a great point. And even if the problem presents itself because the program hallucinated, you're absolutely right.

28:04The blame should not be on the computer program, which is just doing what it's supposed to do. It is not the author. And even if it's even if it's doing what it's supposed to incorrectly to blame the hallucination on AI is a is a jazz hands trick. It's like, oh, I didn't fuck up when I signed this document. You know, it was chat GPT. And I feel like as people that our job is like reading and like being able to be able to place the blame of what's happening. every time we talk about this being the fault of a program some lazy lawyer who didn't do their job gets off the hook that's actually a great assignment for you joe and the legal tech writers journalist roundtable let's let's come up with a term okay that is sufficiently scoldy i was gonna say that because if because because if i was because if i was arguing the case and i I just put down a fake name, not because of AI.

29:02I just made some shit up. Why wouldn't that be fraud? Well, I agree with – I actually think the word you used a minute ago was the right one, which is lazy. And even dating back to the Aoyanka case when people were calling for all sorts of Skynet and the robots are destroying everything. I was like, no, this is just laziness. It's no different than getting a bunch of cases that are red flagged and not checking up on that, right? Like you still, even in traditional research, you're supposed to check and make sure the thing you've got works. It's like a particular variety of laziness, though. Yeah, it's accelerated laziness, but it is nonetheless laziness.

29:42AI-assisted laziness. Yeah, I was just saying, and I get that it is funny and in jest, but like laziness itself doesn't sound like, I don't know, like malevolent isn't the word. Problematic. Yeah. Because what would be the consequence if someone were to just like wholesale make create like a, oh, I can do this because of Money Tree versus Bush 1979 and like just wrote that. And then somebody was like, hey, you made this up and it didn't have an AI program or a less ex-nesses to push off some of the blame for it. Well, right. If somebody is making things up because they are intending to defraud the court, that's obviously a willful thing that causes a bunch of higher level problems.

30:27But if you just put in cases that you failed to site check correctly or ones that came out of this sort of system, that's just you being lazy. And, you know, you use the word lazy first, but I jumped on that lazy one because I think, one, it is going to become more knowingly as these stories become more publicly available. People know that you that their laziness, you know, it's the, you know, negligence versus reckless standard at a certain point. Because like you're knowingly using a thing that is prone to error and not checking the error. I feel better about using reckless than lazy. Exactly.

31:02And the second issue of it is laziness is a real insult in an industry where we bill 100 hours a week. Like I feel like at that point, you should feel bad about that. That is not being zealous. All right. Well, that was a good one. This one could have been a longer story, but it doesn't need to be because we've already talked about it to death. A lot of these things we've mentioned. I have overlapped. Supreme Court term is now over. Woo! They can't mess us up more this year. They can. This term. They already still have, because there's still shadow docket stuff happening. However, the big term ended.

31:45This story I focused on just because I thought it was particularly galling. So John Roberts followed up the last day in which they started taking away rights, right, and left. He rolled into the Fourth Circuit a conference to talk to them about it and reiterated that any criticism that the court gets, ultimately, it's just people who are losers who have lost their case. And he doesn't really think it's really all that important to pay attention to. So dissents and scholarly criticisms, none of that stuff bothers him or his colleagues because scoreboard. It is definitely an act of sort of linguistic violence to cabin all of this legitimate criticism and just say sore loser.

32:37Right. But he doesn't care. Well, right. He does not care. And this is the only reason I really zeroed in on this story was because it it's a follow on from a story from earlier in the year, which is that in the annual report that Roberts has to put out where he almost never actually delivers an annual report. just kind of like some statistics and some random thoughts yeah it's like it's like his it's like a christmas letter from one of those families types of christmas letter he's like oh we all laughed with justice alito but you know found that in his hamburger whatever point is he in the this year's version he went off on how criticism is of the judiciary is important lip service but then he He goes into great detail about how, except here's all the criticism I think is illegitimate if it's directed at me, up to and including claiming that people criticizing him on blogs is the equivalent of in the civil rights era, people burning crosses on district judges' lawns.