The latest deterrent? We’ll see. A law firm must pay more than $45,000 in attorney fees to another law firm for its misuse of AI.

As reported by Kelly Burke in Project Counsel Media (Well, this might help solve the problem. A law firm must pay more than $45,000 in attorney fees to another law firm for its misuse of artificial intelligence which led to “hallucinations”, available here), Tennessee personal injury firm Reaves Law Firm PLLC must pay more than $45,000 in attorney fees to Baker Donelson Bearman Caldwell & Berkowitz PC over Reaves Law’s misuse of artificial intelligence in a federal malpractice suit against Baker Donelson.

U.S. District Judge Sheryl H. Lipman found last month that self-represented Reaves Law should be sanctioned for filing a motion with faulty citations likely generated by AI and then continuing to enter filings with the same errors after being notified of the mistakes.

Judge Lipman ordered Baker Donelson to provide an accounting of the hours its attorneys spent responding to the filings containing the errors to determine the amount Reaves Law should pay. Judge Lipman said in an order Friday that after Reaves Law failed to object to Baker Donelson’s accounting by the court’s deadline, she deemed their “assertions undisputed.”

After slightly adjusting downward the number of hours Baker Donelson’s lawyers should be compensated for, Judge Lipman entered an award of $45,763 in her Friday order. In her June order finding that Reaves Law should be sanctioned, Judge Lipman directed the court clerk to forward the order to the Tennessee Board of Professional Responsibility’s disciplinary counsel and said Baker Donelson was entitled to recoup fees.

It was in a partial motion to dismiss counterclaims and subsequent filings relating to Baker Donelson’s motion for judgment on the pleadings that Reaves Law allegedly misused generative AI, according to the order.

In arriving at her June decision to sanction Reaves Law and Henry Reaves III, who represented the firm and serves as its CEO, Judge Lipman said the firm failed to follow her instructions to provide a list of all the cases cited in various filings that had been called into question, detailing if each case exists, how it was verified, whether it was pertinent to the argument being made and if its quotations were accurate.

The irony is that Reaves Law had accused Baker Donelson and various individual attorneys in a complaint last year of bungling underlying representation that ended in a $3.6 million judgment against Reaves Law. Baker Donelson fired back with counterclaims alleging Reaves Law failed to pay legal fees for its representation in several matters.

Their own representation of themselves doesn’t appear to be going that well, either.

Could making the hallucinators pay attorneys’ fees for the other side reduce the number of cases involving AI hallucinations? Maybe, at least for the lawyers who are doing it. But, as I noted here (again), they are less than half the problem.

So, what do you think? Are you surprised that the court ruled that the law firm must pay more than $45,000 in attorney fees because of AI hallucinations? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using DALL-E 3, using the term “robot lawyer wearing a suit reading a court ruling with mouth open in shock”.

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