Attorneys for MyPillow's Mike Lindell accused of using AI to prepare court filing

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2. When I retired five years ago there was no rule prohibiting the use of AI. It didn't really exist in today's form.

I’m still unaware of any ethical or court rule against it. But the judge’s problem wasn’t that they used AI, per se. It’s that their brief was riddled with incorrect citations, incorrect quotes from cases, incorrect legal conclusions from cases, legal conclusions that were never mentioned in the cases cited, and totally made up citations.

Every first year law student learns about legal research and proper citation form. Those skills allow you to find the law, and present it in a manner in which the judge or other side can find it to confirm what you are saying is true.

An attorney has an ethical duty not to mislead the court. I always made sure if I was quoting material, the quote was accurate, word-for-word. The last step in the briefing process was to go through each case cite, and Shepardize them to make sure the party names were spelled correctly, and that the citation to volume number, case reporter, page numbers, court and year of decision were correct. Sometimes errors are made during dictation or transcription. That gives you a last chance to fix them. It goes without saying an attorney shouldn’t make up cases or misrepresent the holdings of cases that actually exist.