Doha, Qatar: A New York attorney and his firm are facing a court hearing after their firm used ChatGPT in legal research.
The lawyer is facing charges after the court discovered that the legal paperwork presented had referred to non-existent legal cases.
According to BBC, the incident began when a man sued an airline for alleged personal injuries. The plaintiff’s lawyers provided a document citing multiple previous court cases, attempting to use them as a precedent for his case to proceed.
However, the airline's attorneys informed the judge that they couldn't find several of the cases mentioned in the document.
Judge Castel asked the plaintiff’s legal team to clarify their actions.
"Six of the submitted cases appear to be bogus judicial decisions with bogus quotes and bogus internal citations,” said the judge.
Investigation into the matter revealed that the research was conducted by Steven A. Schwartz, an attorney with over 30 years of experience.
Schwartz had admitted that he used ChatGPT to look up similar past cases.
The seasoned lawyer explained in a written statement that he had originally filed Mata’s lawsuit in state court, but the airline had it transferred to Manhattan’s federal court, where Schwartz is not eligible for practise.
LoDuca, a fellow lawyer at the firm, became the attorney of record, but Schwartz stated that it was him who went on with the legal research, and that his colleague had no role in it.
Screenshots accompanying the filing showed a conversation between Schwartz and ChatGPT in which during one instance, Schwartz asked if a specific case was real and ChatGPT responded affirmatively, claiming it could be found in legal reference databases.
Even after double-checking ChatGPT insisted that the case was real.
The case in question, Varghese v. China Southern Airlines Co Ltd, could not be found anywhere by any other lawyers.
The court ordered a hearing on June 8 to assess whether Schwartz and his law firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman should face disciplinary action.
ChatGPT is an advanced language model capable of generating human-like responses to various prompts. It has gained popularity since its launch in November 2022, with millions of people utilizing its capabilities for natural language processing.
