Morgan & Morgan—which bills itself as "America's largest injury law firm" that fights "for the people"—learned the hard way this month that even one lawyer blindly citing AI-hallucinated case law can risk sullying the reputation of an entire nationwide firm.
In a letter shared in a court filing, Morgan & Morgan's chief transformation officer, Yath Ithayakumar, warned the firms' more than 1,000 attorneys that citing fake AI-generated cases in court filings could be cause for disciplinary action, including "termination."
"This is a serious issue," Ithayakumar wrote. "The integrity of your legal work and reputation depend on it."
Morgan & Morgan's AI troubles were sparked in a lawsuit claiming that Walmart was involved in designing a supposedly defective hoverboard toy that allegedly caused a family's house fire. Despite being an experienced litigator, Rudwin Ayala, the firm's lead attorney on the case, cited eight cases in a court filing that Walmart's lawyers could not find anywhere except on ChatGPT.
These "cited cases seemingly do not exist anywhere other than in the world of Artificial Intelligence," Walmart's lawyers said, urging the court to consider sanctions.
So far, the court has not ruled on possible sanctions. But Ayala was immediately dropped from the case and was replaced by his direct supervisor, T. Michael Morgan, Esq. Expressing "great embarrassment" over Ayala's fake citations that wasted the court's time, Morgan struck a deal with Walmart's attorneys to pay all fees and expenses associated with replying to the errant court filing, which Morgan told the court should serve as a "cautionary tale" for both his firm and "all firms."
Reuters found that lawyers improperly citing AI-hallucinated cases have scrambled litigation in at least seven cases in the past two years. Some lawyers have been sanctioned, including an early case last June fining lawyers $5,000 for citing chatbot "gibberish" in filings. And in at least one case in Texas, Reuters reported, a lawyer was fined $2,000 and required to attend a course on responsible use of generative AI in legal applications. But in another high-profile incident, Michael Cohen, Donald Trump's former lawyer, avoided sanctions after Cohen accidentally gave his own attorney three fake case citations to help his defense in his criminal tax and campaign finance litigation.