Every few weeks, it seems, another attorney makes headlines for the same mistake: filing a brief built on AI-generated cases that don’t exist. My new article, “Fake Cases, Real Consequences: The Reputation Risks Facing Attorneys Using AI,” published by the Practising Law Institute, looks at what happens next, both in court and online.
To be clear, AI isn’t the problem. Unchecked AI is. Tools like ChatGPT don’t retrieve information the way a search engine does. They generate it. That’s how a federal judge in Wyoming could find only one of nine cases cited in a motion, and how a California appellate court discovered that 21 of 23 quotations in a brief were fabricated. The penalties are steep: six-figure fines, disqualification, bar referrals, and orders to hand the court’s opinion to clients, colleagues, and other judges.
From where I sit, though, the courtroom is only the beginning.
These cases are now a regular beat for Reuters, Bloomberg Law, The New York Times, and The Guardian, and for the legal trade press, including ABA Journal, Law360, and Above the Law. The stories name names: the lawyer, the firm, and often the client. And they reach the people who matter most to a practice, such as general counsel, referral sources, prospective clients, and the judges an attorney will appear before again.
Search engines and AI tools treat those outlets as highly authoritative. One sanctions story can sit on the first page of your Google results and shape what ChatGPT says about you for years. After more than fifteen years in online reputation management, I can tell you there is no quick way to make accurate news coverage disappear. Trying to suppress it usually makes things worse.
In the article, I cover:
• The kinds of AI failures courts have documented, with cases that illustrate each
• What ABA Formal Opinion 512 requires on competence, confidentiality, fees, and supervision
• Why supervising attorneys are sanctioned for filings they didn’t draft
• What to do if an error surfaces
Verifying every citation before it goes out the door is an ethical duty. It’s also the cheapest form of reputation protection there is.
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