“Your Honor, I personally did not check it. I am responsible for it not being checked.”
"Mike Lindell's lawyers managed to combine AI hallucinations with basic professional negligence into one $6,000 lesson for the rest of us."
You have to admire the efficiency here: Mike Lindell's lawyers managed to combine AI hallucinations with basic professional negligence into one $6,000 lesson for the rest of us. Christopher Kachouroff and Jennifer DeMaster each owe $3,000 for filing a brief with 30 defective citations, including cases that don't exist.
When Judge Nina Wang asked if Christopher Kachouroff had verified the citations after using AI, he said: "Your Honor, I personally did not check it. I am responsible for it not being checked." They signed and certified a document to a federal court without doing the most basic part of their job—making sure their legal citations were real.
This isn't some novel AI safety issue. This is two lawyers who forgot that signing your name to a court filing means you're vouching for its accuracy. For legal teams, the takeaway is embarrassingly simple: if you wouldn't submit a brief without checking whether your law clerk made up the cases, don't submit one without checking whether your AI did either.
Heather Willard
